The School of Communication’s Dr. Russell Clayton was recently recognized and awarded by the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) as the winner of their research fellowship competition. As part of the award, AAA will be funding a research study that will be conducted in the Cognition and Emotion Lab this summer and during the upcoming fall semester.

The experiment will examine how tobacco smokers cognitively and emotionally process secondhand anti-tobacco commercials by collecting psychophysiological responses. Additionally, subjects will self-report whether the commercials elicited smoking urges or intentions to quit and whether the consequences associated with secondhand smoke that were presented in the commercials were considered overly dramatic. The study will also look at how well the messages were encoded into memory.

Clayton’s study is part of a large, on-going series of tobacco-related research studies. The overarching goal of these studies is to learn how to better inform message producers on how to effectively design anti-tobacco messages in hopes of reducing tobacco consumption.