Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Effects of self-transcendence on neural responses to persuasive messages and health behavior change.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04279483 (Geo Smoking Study and Neural and Geospatial Examination of Smokers' Exposure to Retail Environments), which is not on this map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Geo Smoking Study and Neural and Geospatial Examination of Smokers' Exposure to Retail Environments
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 79 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mindful attention promotes control of brain network dynamics for self-regulation and discontinues the past from the present.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- The neural basis of prosocial effort-based decision making in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- A Candidate EEG Spectral Index of Internally Oriented Attention: An Exploratory Comparison of Prayer and Relaxation.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Baseline physical activity moderates brain-behaviour relationships in response to framed health messages.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Protocol for an intergenerational randomized controlled trial to enhance physical activity in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2025Article
- A technology-based randomized controlled trial of self-affirmation and gain-framed health messaging to reduce sedentary behavior in older adults.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Empathy and helping: the role of affect in response to others' suffering.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Impact of the Cost of Travel Time and Feedback Type on Green Travel.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Neurobehavioral Mechanisms Influencing the Association Between Generativity, the Desire to Promote Well-Being of Younger Generations, and Purpose in Life in Older Adults at Risk for Alzheimer's Disease.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- Ventromedial frontoinsular connectivity is associated with long-term smoking behavior change in aging.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Characteristics and influencing factors of social isolation in patients with breast cancer: a latent profile analysis.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2023Article
- Altered Grey Matter-Brain Healthcare Quotient: Interventions of Olfactory Training and Learning of Neuroplasticity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Impact of spiritual values on tourists' psychological wellbeing: evidence from China's Buddhist mountains.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The neural correlates of value hierarchies: a prospective typology based on personal value profiles of emerging adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Trust in COVID-19 public health information.Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2022Article
- Brain system integration and message consistent health behavior change.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2022Article
- Spirituality as a protective factor for chronic and acute anxiety in Brazilian healthcare workers during the COVID-19 outbreak.PloS one · 2022Article
- Becoming the King in the North: identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self-other neural overlap.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Social networks and neural receptivity to persuasive health messages.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2021Article
- Developing a web-based support using self-affirmation to motivate lifestyle changes in type 2 diabetes: A qualitative study assessing patient perspectives on self-management and views on a digital lifestyle intervention.Internet interventions · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Self-transcendence refers to a shift in mindset from focusing on self-interests to the well-being of others. We offer an integrative neural model of self-transcendence in the context of persuasive messaging by examining the mechanisms of self-transcendence in promoting receptivity to health messages and behavior change. Specifically, we posited that focusing on values and activities that transcend the self can allow people to see that their self-worth is not tied to a specific behavior in question, and in turn become more receptive to subsequent, otherwise threatening health information. To test whether inducing self-transcendent mindsets before message delivery would help overcome defensiveness and increase receptivity, we used two priming tasks, affirmation and compassion, to elicit a transcendent mindset among 220 sedentary adults. As preregistered, those who completed a self-transcendence task before health message exposure, compared with controls, showed greater increases in objectively logged levels of physical activity throughout the following month. In the brain, self-transcendence tasks up-regulated activity in a region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, chosen for its role in positive valuation and reward processing. During subsequent health message exposure, self-transcendence priming was associated with increased activity in subregions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, implicated in self-related processing and positive valuation, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior. The present findings suggest that having a positive self-transcendent mindset can increase behavior change, in part by increasing neural receptivity to health messaging.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.