Description:

Exposure to media content is ubiquitous in daily life.  Contemporary adolescents and young adults are particularly engaged with content that may elicit emotional reactions.  In this talk I will describe a series of studies designed to examine how emotionally-evocative stimuli, including cigarette warning labels and tweets inclusive of negative, discriminatory content, are processed in adolescents and young adults and the extent to which they induce changes in emotional states.  Findings from the cigarette cue study indicate that aversive smoking-related images can reduce craving and engage fronto mesolimbic and insular systems in adolescent smokers.  Results from the Tweet Study support the hypothesis that negative stimuli experienced through social media evoke negative affect, which relates to neural and executive functioning.  Collectively these studies demonstrate how negative media content may be particularly impactful on the developing brain and behavior.

Dr. Adriana Galván is a Professor of Psychology at UCLA whose expertise is in adolescent brain development.