Social campaigns are persuasive messages that attempt to communicate positive ideas and practices. One of the main challenges in designing effective social campaigns is the need to compete with other advertisements for viewers’ attention. One of the most widely used methods of drawing attention to social advertising is the use of negative emotions. However, the effectiveness of negative emotional appeals in social campaigns is still a topic of debates. The aim of the study was to use both declarative and neural (EEG) measures to examine whether increasing the intensity of negative emotions in a social campaign enhances its effectiveness linearly or only to a certain level (curvilinear relation). The experimental study was conducted (N = 62) with road safety campaign, using three different levels of negative emotional intensity. The results showed that even though advertising with the strongest negative stimuli evoked the strongest negative emotions, it had no significantly stronger influence on behavioral intention (driving less risky) than moderately negative stimuli. Moreover, neural reaction to the negative stimuli in advertising depended on driving style–people with risky driving style payed less attention to more threatening message (higher beta oscillations).

Social campaigns are an important tool for promoting positive change in social attitudes (in ecology, health prevention, tolerance promotion, etc.). Improving their effectiveness may therefore have a very tangible effect on many aspects of life – both for individuals and for whole societies. Among the most widespread activities that are undertaken within the framework of social campaigns, one can mention advertising through different types of media – television, radio, internet and print. Assessment of this element is done mostly on the basis of questionnaires and focus groups. Research of this type relies on measures that are proximal, such as perceived effectiveness. Although it is assumed that perceived effectiveness is causally antecedent to actual effectiveness, it would be advisable to find the way of assessing actual effectiveness more directly. One of the approaches, that aim to solve this problem is application of the tools of cognitive neuroscience. The use of cognitive neuroscience techniques for pretesting media messages in social campaigns requires properly designed research. In order to do that, the pivotal stage of each experiment design is the choice of media stimuli that will be presented to the participants. Different media and contents will lead to different patterns of responses in viewers, determining a great deal about how a message is processed, including which parts of the message are attended to, and how the message is evaluated and liked. Stimuli presented during the experiment can be static, like pictures or dynamic, like video. However, such stimuli may not be representative of real-life situations. To avoid problems with picture and video stimuli, one can use virtual environments. The aim of the article is to present a concept of virtual reality system that could enable the research of media messages effectiveness in social campaigns.

Epilepsy is one of the widespread disorders. It is a noncommunicable disease that affects the human nerve system. Seizures are abnormal patterns of behavior in the electricity of the brain which produce symptoms like losing consciousness, attention or convulsions in the whole body. This paper demonstrates an effective electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure detection method using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) for signal decomposition to extract features. An automatic channel selection method was proposed by the researcher to select the best channel from 23 channels based on maximum variance value. The records were segmented into a nonoverlapping segment with long 1-S. The support vector machine (SVM) model was used to automatically detect segments that contain seizures, using both frequency and time domain statistical moment features. The experimental result was obtained from 24 patients in CHB-MIT database. The average accuracy is 94.1, sensitivity is 93.5, specificity is 94.6 and the false positive rate average is 0.054.

Public communication campaigns are among the tools for promoting electricity saving. A crucial task in the process of creating a campaign is to design a simple message to effectively reach the average consumer. It is a beneficial practice to create alternative messages and pretest them to find the most effective. The research methodology during pretesting includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. However, it is believed that the outcomes obtained with the use of conventional techniques are not fully reliable. Therefore, the following question arises: What additional research methods should be applied at the stage of testing the message of a communication campaign so that its effectiveness can be assessed more reliably and/or improved even before its broadcast? In this study, we aim to present the possibility of applying cognitive neuroscience methods in conjunction with a questionnaire to experimentally check the effectiveness of the message using the example of selected electricity-saving communication campaigns. The key results of this study indicate that merging conscious and subconscious reactions to media messages allows us to gain new knowledge that can be used in the future to improve the communication campaign effectiveness. Our investigation showed the benefits that can be obtained by synergizing traditional research methods with neuroscientific approaches.

One of the most important elements of advertising campaigns is their message. Many factors can influence message effectiveness, inter alia, the content, the form, the carrier, or the location of the advertisement. Together, these aspects can determine how visible the advertising message is to the audience. At the campaign-planning stage, it is usually hard to tell how the advertisement should be presented and properly exposed so that the recipients perceive and remember it. We propose performing the pre-test of advertisements with the use of a virtual reality system that provides the environment close to the natural conditions and using cognitive neuroscience tools to record the objective measures of the audience’s opinions. Our proposal shows the procedure for designing and conducting an experiment that allows for an assessment of the advertising message effectiveness based on its visibility. The article also presents the preliminary results of a pilot experiment that was designed to test both the virtual reality system and the proposed procedure.