Join Dr. Joseph LaBrie, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Heads UP Alcohol Prevention and Intervention Lab at Loyola Marymount University, for our April 2023 IAS Speaker Series event!

Soto Street Building Room 116

1845 N. Soto Street Los Angeles, CA 90032

Lunch and parking provided.

(Please see receptionist upon arrival and she will provide you with a parking permit to place on your dashboard.)

Talk Title: Rethinking Brief Substance Use Interventions: Including Novel Social Media Methods and Gamification to Increase Reach and Effectiveness

Description: Normative re-education (e.g., personalized normative feedback (PNF)) is a popular behavior change intervention strategy with non-treatment seeking populations. It is central to most alcohol prevention programs for college students and others. Although PNF has been shown to be efficacious, effect sizes are relatively small and a number of limitations associated with this approach exist: psychological reactance, believability/credibility of the normative statistics source, the undermining influence of alcohol images on social media, and a lack of autonomy in participation. Our lab initiated a program of research that leverages gamification to address these limitations and improve the effectiveness of normative re-education programs. This talk presents a series of studies that isolated critical components of gamification (i.e., virtual copresence, chance-based uncertainty, and points systems) which increased the effectiveness of PNF interventions. Further, results from two studies testing gamified normative re-education programs with two distinct samples of non-treatment-seeking individuals (college students and lesbian- and bisexual-identified women) will be presented. Gamification is a promising avenue to overcome limitations inherent to PNF and increase the efficacy of normative re-education interventions.

Register now by clicking here!