2019 Bettinghaus Lecture

Fri, Apr 05, 2019   3:30 PM ‐ Sat, Apr 20, 2019   5:00 PM

Friday, April 5
3:30pm-5:00pm in CAS 145

Join us for our 2019 Bettinghaus Lecture featuring Emily Falk, PhD Associate Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Neural approaches to understanding how ideas and behaviors spread

The leading causes of death in many countries around the world are behaviors that are preventable. But these behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum- they spread from person to person and can be influenced by persuasive messaging interventions. What makes some messaging interventions more effective than others? What makes some ideas spread like fire while others fizzle? In this talk, I will provide an overview of work linking brain responses in the brain’s value system to individual behavior change and the spread of ideas, as well as population level behaviors that go beyond the individuals whose brains are scanned. Finally, I will describe recent research that incorporates social network measurements into models linking brain and socially influenced behavior outcomes.

Emily Falk is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, with secondary appointments in Psychology and Marketing at Penn. Falk employs a variety of methods in the performance of her research, with a focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). She has worked to develop a program of research that links neural activity (in response to persuasive messages) to behaviors at the individual, group, and population levels. In particular, Falk is interested in predicting behavior change following exposure to persuasive messages and in understanding what makes successful ideas spread (e.g. through social networks, through cultures). At present, much of her research focuses on health communication and linking neural responses to health messages to population level behavioral outcomes; other areas of interest include political communication, cross-cultural communication, and the spread of culture, social norms, and sticky ideas. Falk's work has been funded by grants from NCI, NICHD, ARL, DARPA, and the NIH Director's New Innovator Award. Prior to her doctoral work, she was a Fulbright Fellow in health policy, studying health communication in Canada. She received her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Brown University, and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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