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Recent evidence indicates that attention is higher for individually tailored as compared to non-tailored health communications. The present study examined whether the predicted increased attention for the tailored as opposed to general nutrition education messages is moderated by presenting high vs. low threat information about the negative consequences of an unhealthy diet. In a mixed subject experimental design, undergraduate students (N=34) were reading tailored and non-tailored nutrition education messages with either high or low threat information about the negative consequences of an unhealthy diet. At the same time, they had to pay attention to specific odd auditory stimuli in a sequence of frequent auditory stimuli (oddball paradigm). The amount of attention allocation was measured by recording event-related potentials (ERPs; i.e., N100, MMN, P300) and reaction times. Result revealed main effects of tailoring and threat, indicating that more attention resources were allocated to tailored vs. non-tailored messages and to low threat vs. high threat messages. The findings confirm that tailoring is an effective means to draw attention to health messages, whereas threat information seems to result in a loss in message attention.

Objective: Previous studies indicate that people respond defensively to threatening health information, especially when the information challenges self-relevant goals. The authors investigated whether reduced acceptance of self-relevant health risk information is already visible in early attention processes, that is, attention disengagement processes. Design: In a randomized, controlled trial with 29 smoking and nonsmoking students, a variant of Posner's cueing task was used in combination with the high-temporal resolution method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Main Outcome Measures: Reaction times and P300 ERP. Results: Smokers showed lower P300 amplitudes in response to high- as opposed to low-threat invalid trials when moving their attention to a target in the opposite visual field, indicating more efficient attention disengagement processes. Furthermore, both smokers and nonsmokers showed increased P300 amplitudes in response to the presentation of high- as opposed to low-threat valid trials, indicating threat-induced attention-capturing processes. Reaction time measures did not support the ERP data, indicating that the ERP measure can be extremely informative to measure low-level attention biases in health communication. Conclusion: The findings provide the first neuroscientific support for the hypothesis that threatening health information causes more efficient disengagement among those for whom the health threat is self-relevant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)

The authors tested whether individually tailored health communications receive more attention from the reader than nontailored health communications in a randomized, controlled trial among student volunteers (N = 24). They used objective measures of attention allocation during the message exposure. In a between-subjects design, participants had to read tailored or nontailored nutrition education messages and at the same time had to pay attention to specific odd auditory stimuli in a sequence of frequent auditory stimuli (odd ball paradigm). The amount of attention allocation was measured by recording event-related potentials (ERPs; i.e., N100 and P300 ERPs) and reaction times. For the tailored as opposed to the nontailored group, results revealed larger amplitudes for the N 100 effect, smaller amplitudes for the P300 effect, and slower reaction times. Resource allocation theory and these results suggest that those in the tailored group allocated more attention resources to the nutrition message than those in the nontailored group.