NEWS in SCIENCE
A little extra help.
By C.W.
All of us who have kids worry, eventually, about teaching them safe sex. But we all also have to wonder, how? Does teaching abstinence really work? How do we get them to use condoms? Do they really trust us with information about their sex life?
Well, as difficult as it may be to keep kids safe, Public Health has taken it as their solemn duty to help with that problem. Sex-ed is taught wherever you find public health programs and condoms can be found about anywhere. However, what can we do about the threat of STDs in our community as a whole? According to studies, 50,000 new cases of HIV happen every year in America! HIV is a disease that can grow to kill, and fast. So who is it that needs that extra help and how do we help them too?
Minority men who are intimate with other men are a vulnerable group of people in this case because they are at higher risk to spread and catch STDs. So we definitely know who to help. But, again, how??? So, a group of scientists decided to try a different approach to reach out to these people specifically. So, they started making safe-sex ads that would be much more relatable for this group of men.
These commercials included people of the same race and with the same sexual preference. After testing to see if it made any real difference in the way they thought about safe-sex and condoms, the scientists saw that it actually did! The brains men who had seen the special commercials actually started to act differently. They started to think more about using a condom and participating in safe-sex!
Wang, A., Lowen, S. B., Shi, Z., Bissey, B., Metzger, D. S., & Langleben, D. D. (2016). Targeting modulates audiences’ brain and behavioral responses to safe sex video ads. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(10), 1650-1657. doi:10.1093/scan/nsw070 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/scan/nsw070
Please send any questions or comments to Dr. Spitzer (spitzern@marshall.edu )
Note: Any opinions expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of Dr. Spitzer, the Department of Biological Sciences, or Marshall University.