Project description DEENESFRITPL Communicating our way to better health Health communication professionals can play a powerful role in motivating people to eat better, quit smoking, and exercise. Creating an effective campaign – one that encourages long-lasting behaviour changes and improved public health outcomes – is not that easy. Campaigns face tough competition in a crowded media marketplace and need to compete with social trends. The EU-funded TheRealCompetition project will examine how to optimise public health campaigns in the context of health, investigating unhealthy media and peer content on social media. The project will implement a game-changing approach, connecting computational social science and neuroimaging to understand the neuropsychological processes that explain campaign effects. Show the project objective Hide the project objective Objective Malleable unhealthy behaviors excessively burden global societies. Public health media campaigns could offer cost-effective, large-scale interventions, but affect behavior only minimally. To date, health campaigns are optimized to outperform alternative health campaigns in their effects on behavior (e.g. comparing gain to loss-framed messages). Yet, in real life campaigns face other competitors like campaign-related media and peer-produced content. These sources are amplified by popular social media and thus often presented in close proximity to health campaigns. Each source may favor healthy or unhealthy viewpoints, causing health campaign-consistent or -contradictory updates to an individual’s evaluation of a behavior. Ignoring real-world competitors of public health campaigns is a grave oversight that can reduce or even reverse campaign effects on behavior. I seek to understand and optimize public health campaigns in the context of TheRealCompetition, namely healthy and unhealthy media and peer content on social media. This is non-trivial. Self-reporting media exposure and psychological processes underlying media effects overburdens lay participants who struggle to recall and explain how they integrate multiple competing influences on their behavior. In a game-changing interdisciplinary approach, I connect computational social science and neuroimaging to objectively and unobtrusively quantify daily exposure to campaign-related social media content, and understand the neuropsychological processes that explain campaign effects in the context of other sources of influence. Results offer actionable recommendations for practitioners and ecologically validate basic decision-making models. This action brings my unique dual expertise in media effects and neuroscience to Europe, adds computational social science to my skills, and develops my interdisciplinary team leader skills. I will answer novel questions, broaden collaborations, and significantly accelerate my career. Fields of science natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologymedical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthsocial sciencessociologygovernancepublic servicesnatural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryalcoholsnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning Keywords Alcohol consumption public health campaigns health behaviour social media social influence decision-making automated content analysis neural value system Programme(s) H2020-EU.1.3. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Main Programme H2020-EU.1.3.2. - Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility Topic(s) MSCA-IF-2018 - Individual Fellowships Call for proposal H2020-MSCA-IF-2018 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF) Coordinator UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM Net EU contribution € 175 572,48 Address Spui 21 1012WX Amsterdam Netherlands See on map Region West-Nederland Noord-Holland Groot-Amsterdam Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00
