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Exposure is key to message effects. No effects can ensue if a health, political, or commercial message is not noticed. Yet, existing research in communication, advertising, and related disciplines often measures 'opportunities for exposure' at an aggregate level, whereas knowing whether recipients were 'actually exposed' to a message requires a micro-level approach. Micro-level research, on the other hand, focuses on message processing and retention, takes place under highly controlled laboratory conditions with forced message exposure, and largely ignores how recipients attend selectively to messages under more natural conditions. Eye-tracking enables us to assess actual exposure, but its previous applications were restricted to screen-based reading paradigms lacking ecological validity or field studies that suffer from limited experimental control. Our solution is to measure eye-tracking within an immersive VR environment that creates the message delivery and reception context. Specifically, we simulate a car ride down a highway alongside which billboards are placed. The VR headset (HP Omnicept Pro) provides an interactive 3D view of the environment and holds a seamlessly integrated binocular eye tracker that records the drivers' gaze and detects all fixations on the billboards. This allows us to quantify the nexus between exposure and reception rigorously, and to link our measures to subsequent memory, i.e., whether messages were remembered, forgotten, or not even encoded. An empirical study shows that incidental memory for messages differs based on participants' gaze behavior while passing the billboards. The study further shows how an experimental manipulation of attentional demands directly impacts drivers' gaze behavior and memory. We discuss the large potential of this paradigm to quantify exposure and message reception in realistic communication environments and the equally promising applications in new media contexts (e.g., the Metaverse).
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Publicidade , Realidade Virtual , Humanos , Tecnologia de Rastreamento Ocular , Comunicação , Meios de Comunicação de MassaRESUMO
Every day, the world of media is at our fingertips, whether it is watching movies, listening to the radio, or browsing online media. On average, people spend over 8 h per day consuming messages from the mass media, amounting to a total lifetime dose of more than 20 years in which conceptual content stimulates our brains. Effects from this flood of information range from short-term attention bursts (e.g., by breaking news features or viral 'memes') to life-long memories (e.g., of one's favorite childhood movie), and from micro-level impacts on an individual's memory, attitudes, and behaviors to macro-level effects on nations or generations. The modern study of media's influence on society dates back to the 1940s. This body of mass communication scholarship has largely asked, "what is media's effect on the individual?" Around the time of the cognitive revolution, media psychologists began to ask, "what cognitive processes are involved in media processing?" More recently, neuroimaging researchers started using real-life media as stimuli to examine perception and cognition under more natural conditions. Such research asks: "what can media tell us about brain function?" With some exceptions, these bodies of scholarship often talk past each other. An integration offers new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms through which media affect single individuals and entire audiences. However, this endeavor faces the same challenges as all interdisciplinary approaches: Researchers with different backgrounds have different levels of expertise, goals, and foci. For instance, neuroimaging researchers label media stimuli as "naturalistic" although they are in many ways rather artificial. Similarly, media experts are typically unfamiliar with the brain. Neither media creators nor neuroscientifically oriented researchers approach media effects from a social scientific perspective, which is the domain of yet another species. In this article, we provide an overview of approaches and traditions to studying media, and we review the emerging literature that aims to connect these streams. We introduce an organizing scheme that connects the causal paths from media content â brain responses â media effects and discuss network control theory as a promising framework to integrate media content, reception, and effects analyses.
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Most people in the United States do not engage in sufficient physical activity (PA). However, certain communication behaviors from romantic partners can motivate PA. Research indicates that confirming communication and communal coping (CC) in romantic relationships can increase PA efforts, but less research has examined the role of explicitly disconfirming communication or relationships between confirmation, disconfirmation, and CC on PA outcomes. We examined models in which shared PA appraisals mediate relationships between (a) confirmation and (b) disconfirmation and joint PA behavior in heterosexual, romantic dyads. Sex differences in actor and partner effects were also considered. Partners (N = 144) in 72 dyads completed assessments of key constructs. Results indicated that shared PA appraisals were critical in the confirmation model, mediating relationships between perceptions of confirmation and reports of joint PA. Unexpectedly, both partners' reports of partner disconfirmation were positively associated with their partners' reports of joint PA. Only one statistically significant sex difference emerged. Theoretical and pragmatic implications are discussed.
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Most adults in the United States (U.S.) fail to meet guidelines for physical activity (PA) and nutrition outlined by the Centers for Disease Control. One important predictor of engagement in healthy behavior is support from one's romantic partner. However, messages from partners may fail to motivate healthy behavior if they threaten recipients' face and cause reactance. The present study examines face-threatening acts (FTAs) and face management strategies (FMSs) in conversations between romantic couples and their associations with reactance, healthy eating, and PA behaviors. Cohabitating couples (N = 70) were recruited, and one member of the couple completed a 10-day diary survey in which they reported on daily memorable conversations they had with their partner about PA and/or healthy eating. Participants completed measures of positive and negative face threat, as well as the extent to which they engaged in healthy eating and PA that day. Trained raters assessed reported conversations for positive and negative face threat as well as positive and negative FMSs. Results indicate that both participant and trained raters' reports of positive face threat were associated with increased reactance, whereas only participants' reports of negative face threat were associated with increased reactance. Both positive and negative FMSs were associated with reduced reactance. Reactance was negatively associated with healthy eating and PA. Results are discussed in terms of implications for reactance and politeness theories, as well as pragmatic implications for the millions of partnered individuals in the U.S. seeking to improve their health.
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Comunicação , Dieta Saudável , Adulto , Humanos , Exercício Físico , Comportamentos Relacionados com a Saúde , Estado NutricionalRESUMO
BACKGROUND: Communication campaigns using social media can raise public awareness; however, they are difficult to sustain. A barrier is the need to generate and constantly post novel but on-topic messages, which creates a resource-intensive bottleneck. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aim to harness the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to build a pilot system that can generate many candidate messages, which could be used for a campaign to suggest novel, on-topic candidate messages. The issue of folic acid, a B-vitamin that helps prevent major birth defects, serves as an example; however, the system can work with other issues that could benefit from higher levels of public awareness. METHODS: We used the Generative Pretrained Transformer-2 architecture, a machine learning model trained on a large natural language corpus, and fine-tuned it using a data set of autodownloaded tweets about #folicacid. The fine-tuned model was then used as a message engine, that is, to create new messages about this topic. We conducted a web-based study to gauge how human raters evaluate AI-generated tweet messages compared with original, human-crafted messages. RESULTS: We found that the Folic Acid Message Engine can easily create several hundreds of new messages that appear natural to humans. Web-based raters evaluated the clarity and quality of a human-curated sample of AI-generated messages as on par with human-generated ones. Overall, these results showed that it is feasible to use such a message engine to suggest messages for web-based campaigns that focus on promoting awareness. CONCLUSIONS: The message engine can serve as a starting point for more sophisticated AI-guided message creation systems for health communication. Beyond the practical potential of such systems for campaigns in the age of social media, they also hold great scientific potential for the quantitative analysis of message characteristics that promote successful communication. We discuss future developments and obvious ethical challenges that need to be addressed as AI technologies for health persuasion enter the stage.
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Comunicação em Saúde , Mídias Sociais , Inteligência Artificial , Ácido Fólico , Humanos , Comunicação PersuasivaRESUMO
This study introduces the concept of value-expressive communication and examines its relationship with behavioral intent. Value-expressive communication is conceptualized as the verbal output of a value-expressive attitude. Value-expressive communication about exercise is examined in relationship to strength of religious faith, exercise attitudes, communication frequency, and intentions to exercise among a sample of self-identified Christians. The data indicate a significant interaction between value-expressive communication and communication frequency explains significant variance in exercise intentions. Interact to and exercise attitudes is significantly associated with intentions to exercise. Suggestions for using value-expressive communication in health communication research and practice are discussed.
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Comunicação , Intenção , Atitude , Exercício Físico , HumanosRESUMO
What are the key ingredients that make some persuasive messages resonate with audiences and elicit action, while others fail? Billions of dollars per year are put towards changing human behavior, but it is difficult to know which messages will be the most persuasive in the field. By combining novel neuroimaging techniques and large-scale online data, we examine the role of key health communication variables relevant to motivating action at scale. We exposed a sample of smokers to anti-smoking web-banner messages from a real-world campaign while measuring message-evoked brain response patterns via fMRI, and we also obtained subjective evaluations of each banner. Neural indices were derived based on: (i) message-evoked activity in specific brain regions; and (ii) spatially distributed response patterns, both selected based on prior research and theoretical considerations. Next, we connected the neural and subjective data with an independent, objective outcome of message success, which is the per-banner click-through rate in the real-world campaign. Results show that messages evoking brain responses more similar to signatures of negative emotion and vividness had lower online click-through-rates. This strategy helps to connect and integrate the rapidly growing body of knowledge about brain function with formative research and outcome evaluation of health campaigns, and could ultimately further disease prevention efforts.
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Mass media messaging is central for health communication. The success of these efforts, however, depends on whether health messages resonate with their target audiences. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to capture brain responses of young adults - an important target group for alcohol prevention - while they viewed real-life video messages of varying perceived message effectiveness about risky alcohol use. We found that strong messages, which were rated to be more effective, prompted enhanced inter-subject correlation (ISC). In further analyses, we linked ISC to subsequent drinking behavior change and used time-resolved EEG-ISC to model functional neuroimaging data (fMRI) of an independent audience. The EEG measure was not only related to sensory-perceptual brain regions, but also to regions previously related to successful messaging, i.e., cortical midline regions and the insula. The findings suggest EEG-ISC as a marker for audience engagement and effectiveness of naturalistic health messages, which could quantify the impact of mass communication within the brains of small target audiences.
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Consumo de Bebidas Alcoólicas/psicologia , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagem , Encéfalo/fisiologia , Comportamentos Relacionados com a Saúde/fisiologia , Comunicação Persuasiva , Adolescente , Adulto , Eletroencefalografia/métodos , Feminino , Seguimentos , Humanos , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética/métodos , Masculino , Estimulação Luminosa/métodos , Inquéritos e Questionários , Gravação em Vídeo/métodos , Adulto JovemRESUMO
There is an increasing trend to use online dating to meet potential partners. Previous studies in off-line contexts indicate that people may judge the risk of sexually transmitted infections based on a person's appearance. Online dating profiles commonly present profile pictures and verbal self-descriptions. To examine the integration of verbal and visual risk information, the current event-related potential (ERP) study used a simulated dating platform in which verbal-descriptive information (low vs. high verbal risk) was presented, followed by a photograph (low vs. high visual risk). Results indicated main effects of verbal and visual risk. Specifically, high-risk compared with low-risk verbal profiles elicited a relative negative shift over occipitoparietal sensor sites between 260 ms and 408 ms. Furthermore, a sustained occipital negativity (132-500 ms) and central positivity (156-272 ms) was observed for high as compared with low visual risk profiles. There was also evidence for the integration of verbal and visual risk formation, as indicated by distinct positive ERP shift occurred between 272 ms and 428 ms over anterior temporal regions when a high-risk photograph was preceded by high-risk verbal information. This suggests that verbal-descriptive information is integrated with visual appearance early in the processing stream. The distinct response for high verbal and visual information extends the notion of an alarm function ascribed to risk perception by demonstrating integration about multiple sources. Simulating online dating platforms provides a useful tool to examine intuitive risk perception.
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Encéfalo/fisiologia , Infecções por HIV , Percepção Social , Adulto , Corte , Eletroencefalografia , Potenciais Evocados , Feminino , Infecções por HIV/psicologia , Humanos , Internet , Relações Interpessoais , Masculino , Percepção Visual/fisiologia , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Health communication delivered via media channels can substantially influence adolescents' choices, and the effects of messages are amplified through interpersonal sharing. However, the underlying psychological and neurocognitive mechanisms that influence message effectiveness and likelihood of sharing are not well understood, especially among adolescents. Based on research in adults, we hypothesized and preregistered that message-induced neural activation in regions associated with self-reflection, social processing, and positive valuation would be related to greater perceived ad effectiveness and intentions to share messages. We focused on brain activity in meta-analytically defined regions associated with these three processes as 40 adolescent nonsmokers viewed advertisements from "The Real Cost" antismoking campaign. Perceived message effectiveness was positively associated with brain activity in the hypothesized social processing regions and marginally associated with brain activity in self-relevance regions, but not associated with brain activity in valuation regions. By contrast, intentions to share the messages were not associated with neural response in these 3 systems. In contrast to previous neuroimaging studies with adult subjects, our findings highlight the role of social cognition in adolescent processing of persuasive messages. We discuss the possibility that the mental processes responsive to effective and shareworthy messages may reflect developmental processes pertinent to media effects.
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Field studies indicate that people may form impressions about potential partners' HIV risk, yet lack insight into what underlies such intuitions. The present study examined which cues may give rise to the perception of riskiness. Towards this end, portrait pictures of persons that are representative of the kinds of images found on social media were evaluated by independent raters on two sets of data: First, sixty visible cues deemed relevant to person perception, and second, perceived HIV risk and trustworthiness, health, and attractiveness. Here, we report correlations between cues and perceived HIV risk, exposing cue-criterion associations that may be used to infer intuitively HIV risk. Second, we trained a multiple cue-based model to forecast perceived HIV risk through cross-validated predictive modelling. Trained models accurately predicted how 'risky' a person was perceived (r = 0.75) in a novel sample of portraits. Findings are discussed with respect to HIV risk stereotypes and implications regarding how to foster effective protective behaviors.
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Intuição , Comportamento Sexual , Parceiros Sexuais , Percepção Visual , Adolescente , Adulto , Feminino , Infecções por HIV , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMO
INTRODUCTION: Interpersonal communication can reinforce media effects on health behavior. Recent studies have shown that brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during message exposure can predict message-consistent behavior change. Key next steps include examining the relationship between neural responses to ads and measures of interpersonal message retransmission that can be collected at scale. METHODS: Neuroimaging, self-report, and automated linguistic measures were utilized to investigate the relationships between neural responses to tobacco prevention messages, sharing engagement, and smoking-relevant belief changes. Thirty-seven adolescent nonsmokers viewed 12 ads from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's "The Real Cost" campaign during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan session (2015-2016). Data were analyzed between 2016 and 2017. The extent that participants talked in detail about the main message of the ads, or sharing engagement, was measured through transcripts of participants' subsequent verbal descriptions using automated linguistic coding. Beliefs about the consequences of smoking were measured before and after the main experiment using surveys. RESULTS: Increased brain activation in self- and value-related subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex during message exposure was associated with subsequent sharing engagement when participants verbally talked about the ads. In addition, sharing engagement was significantly associated with changes in participants' beliefs about the social consequences of smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Neural activity in self- and value-related subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex during exposure to "The Real Cost" campaign was associated with subsequent sharing engagement, which in turn was related to social belief change. These results provide new insights into the link between neurocognitive responses to ads, the content of interpersonal sharing, and downstream health-relevant outcomes. SUPPLEMENT INFORMATION: This article is part of a supplement entitled Fifth Anniversary Retrospective of "The Real Cost," the Food and Drug Administration's Historic Youth Smoking Prevention Media Campaign, which is sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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Comportamentos Relacionados com a Saúde , Relações Interpessoais , Linguística , Córtex Pré-Frontal/metabolismo , Prevenção do Hábito de Fumar , Adolescente , Feminino , Promoção da Saúde , Humanos , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Masculino , Autorrelato , Fumar Tabaco/efeitos adversos , Estados Unidos , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Campaign success is contingent on adequate exposure; however, exposure opportunities (e.g., ad reach/frequency) are imperfect predictors of message recall. We hypothesized that the exposure-recall relationship would be contingent on message processing. We tested moderation hypotheses using 3 data sets pertinent to "The Real Cost" anti-smoking campaign: past 30-day ad recall from a rolling national survey of adolescents aged 13-17 (n = 5,110); ad-specific target rating points (TRPs), measuring ad reach and frequency; and ad-elicited response in brain regions implicated in social processing and memory encoding, from a separate adolescent sample aged 14-17 (n = 40). Average ad-level brain activation in these regions moderates the relationship between national TRPs and large-scale recall (p < .001), such that the positive exposure-recall relationship is more strongly observed for ads that elicit high levels of social processing and memory encoding in the brain. Findings advance communication theory by demonstrating conditional exposure effects, contingent on social and memory processes in the brain.
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How are evaluative reactions pertaining post-national citizenship identities interrelated and what are the potential mechanisms how post-national identities evolve? Previous efforts to operationalize and measure post-national citizenship identities leave it open how people's stances on different issues are related and suffer from a variety of theoretical and methodological shortcomings regarding the nature of political attitudes and ideologies. A recently proposed approach conceptualizes ideologies as networks of causally connected evaluative reactions to individual issues. Individual evaluative reactions form the nodes in a network model, and these nodes can influence each other via linked edges, thereby giving rise to a dynamic thoughts system of networked political and identity-related views. To examine this system at large, we apply network analysis to data from the European Values Study. Specifically, we investigate 33 evaluative reactions regarding national and supra-national identity, diversity, global empathy, global environmentalism, immigration, and supra-national politics. The results reveal a strongly connected network of citizenship identity-related attitudes. A community analysis reveals larger clusters of strongly related evaluative reactions, which are connected via bridges and hub nodes. Centrality analysis identifies evaluative reactions that are strategically positioned in the network, and network simulations indicate that persuasion attempts targeted at such nodes have greater potential to influence the larger citizenship identity than changes of more peripheral attitude nodes. We lastly show that socio-demographic characteristics are not only associated with the overall level of post-national citizenship, but also with the network structure, suggesting that these structural differences can affect the network function as people develop national or post-national citizenship identities, or respond to external events. These results provide new insights into the structure of post-national identities and the mechanism how post-national identities might evolve. We end with a discussion of future opportunities to study networked attitudes in the context of civic and citizenship education.
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Algoritmos , Política , Atitude , Emigração e Imigração , Humanos , Fatores SocioeconômicosRESUMO
Social ties are crucial for humans. Disruption of ties through social exclusion has a marked effect on our thoughts and feelings; however, such effects can be tempered by broader social network resources. Here, we use fMRI data acquired from 80 male adolescents to investigate how social exclusion modulates functional connectivity within and across brain networks involved in social pain and understanding the mental states of others (i.e., mentalizing). Furthermore, using objectively logged friendship network data, we examine how individual variability in brain reactivity to social exclusion relates to the density of participants' friendship networks, an important aspect of social network structure. We find increased connectivity within a set of regions previously identified as a mentalizing system during exclusion relative to inclusion. These results are consistent across the regions of interest as well as a whole-brain analysis. Next, examining how social network characteristics are associated with task-based connectivity dynamics, we find that participants who showed greater changes in connectivity within the mentalizing system when socially excluded by peers had less dense friendship networks. This work provides insight to understand how distributed brain systems respond to social and emotional challenges and how such brain dynamics might vary based on broader social network characteristics.
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Encéfalo , Conectoma , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Comportamento Social , Apoio Social , Teoria da Mente/fisiologia , Adolescente , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagem , Encéfalo/fisiologia , Emoções/fisiologia , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMO
Health communication via mass media is an important strategy when targeting risky drinking, but many questions remain about how health messages are processed and how they unfold their effects within receivers. Here we examine how the brains of young adults-a key target group for alcohol prevention-'tune in' to real-life health prevention messages about risky alcohol use. In a first study, a large sample of authentic public service announcements (PSAs) targeting the risks of alcohol was characterized using established measures of message effectiveness. In the main study, we used inter-subject correlation analysis of fMRI data to examine brain responses to more and less effective PSAs in a sample of young adults. We find that more effective messages command more similar responses within widespread brain regions, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, insulae and precuneus. In previous research, these regions have been related to processing narratives, emotional stimuli, self-relevance and attention towards salient stimuli. The present study thus suggests that more effective health prevention messages have greater 'neural reach', i.e. they engage the brains of audience members' more widely. This work outlines a promising strategy for assessing the effects of health communication at a neural level.
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Consumo de Bebidas Alcoólicas/prevenção & controle , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagem , Promoção da Saúde , Meios de Comunicação de Massa , Comunicação Persuasiva , Adolescente , Adulto , Atenção/fisiologia , Feminino , Humanos , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Masculino , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Emotional cues can guide selective attention processes. However, emotional stimuli can both activate long-term memory representations reflecting general world knowledge and engage newly formed memory representations representing specific knowledge from the immediate past. Here, the self-completion feature of associative memory was utilized to assess the regulation of attention processes by newly-formed emotional memory. First, new memory representations were formed by presenting pictures depicting a person either in an erotic pose or as a portrait. Afterwards, to activate newly-built memory traces, edited pictures were presented showing only the head region of the person. ERP recordings revealed the emotional regulation of attention by newly-formed memories. Specifically, edited pictures from the erotic compared to the portrait category elicited an early posterior negativity and late positive potential, similar to the findings observed for the original pictures. A control condition showed that the effect was dependent on newly-formed memory traces. Given the large number of new memories formed each day, they presumably make an important contribution to the regulation of attention in everyday life.
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Atenção/fisiologia , Emoções/fisiologia , Potenciais Evocados/fisiologia , Memória/fisiologia , Adolescente , Adulto , Encéfalo/fisiologia , Eletroencefalografia , Humanos , Processamento de Imagem Assistida por Computador , Masculino , Estimulação Luminosa , Adulto JovemRESUMO
BACKGROUND: People do not use condoms consistently but instead rely on intuition to identify sexual partners high at risk for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. The present study examined gender differences of intuitive impressions about HIV risk. METHODS: Male and female perceivers evaluated portraits of unacquainted male and female targets regarding their risk for HIV, trait characteristics (trust, responsibility, attractiveness, valence, arousal, and health), and willingness for interaction. RESULTS: Male targets were perceived as more risky than female targets for both perceiver genders. Furthermore, male perceivers reported higher HIV risk perception for both male and female targets than female perceivers. Multiple regression indicated gender differences in the association between person characteristics and HIV risk. In male targets, only trustworthiness predicts HIV risk. In female targets, however, HIV risk is related to trustworthiness, attractiveness, health, valence (for male perceivers), and arousal (for female perceivers). CONCLUSION: The present findings characterize intuitive impressions of HIV risk and reveal differences according to both target and perceiver gender. Considering gender differences in intuitive judgments of HIV risk may help devise effective strategies by shifting the balance from feelings of risk toward a more rational mode of risk perception and the adoption of effective precautionary behaviors.
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Depletion imposes both need and desire to drink, and potentiates the response to need-relevant cues in the environment. The present fMRI study aimed to determine which neural structures selectively increase the incentive value of need-relevant stimuli in a thirst state. Towards this end, participants were scanned twice--either in a thirst or no-thirst state--while viewing pictures of beverages and chairs. As expected, thirst led to a selective increase in self-reported pleasantness and arousal by beverages. Increased responses to beverage when compared with chair stimuli were observed in the cingulate cortex, insular cortex and the amygdala in the thirst state, which were absent in the no-thirst condition. Enhancing the incentive value of need-relevant cues in a thirst state is a key mechanism for motivating drinking behavior. Overall, distributed regions of the motive circuitry, which are also implicated in salience processing, craving and interoception, provide a dynamic body-state dependent representation of stimulus value.
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Motivação/fisiologia , Rede Nervosa/fisiologia , Sede/fisiologia , Adulto , Tonsila do Cerebelo/fisiologia , Nível de Alerta , Bebidas , Mapeamento Encefálico , Córtex Cerebral/fisiologia , Sinais (Psicologia) , Comportamento de Ingestão de Líquido/fisiologia , Feminino , Humanos , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Masculino , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Powerful speeches can captivate audiences, whereas weaker speeches fail to engage their listeners. What is happening in the brains of a captivated audience? Here, we assess audience-wide functional brain dynamics during listening to speeches of varying rhetorical quality. The speeches were given by German politicians and evaluated as rhetorically powerful or weak. Listening to each of the speeches induced similar neural response time courses, as measured by inter-subject correlation analysis, in widespread brain regions involved in spoken language processing. Crucially, alignment of the time course across listeners was stronger for rhetorically powerful speeches, especially for bilateral regions of the superior temporal gyri and medial prefrontal cortex. Thus, during powerful speeches, listeners as a group are more coupled to each other, suggesting that powerful speeches are more potent in taking control of the listeners' brain responses. Weaker speeches were processed more heterogeneously, although they still prompted substantially correlated responses. These patterns of coupled neural responses bear resemblance to metaphors of resonance, which are often invoked in discussions of speech impact, and contribute to the literature on auditory attention under natural circumstances. Overall, this approach opens up possibilities for research on the neural mechanisms mediating the reception of entertaining or persuasive messages.