Young Adults Responses to E-Cigarette Advertisement Features and the Effect of Restricting Features on Tobacco Use
Phase: EARLY_PHASE1
Conditions: E-Cig Use
Sponsor: University of Massachusetts, Worcester

Title: 
Young adults’ responses to e-cigarette advertisement features and the effect of restricting 
features on tobacco use (K99DA046563) 
 
NCT: NCT04249219 
 
Date: 7/26/2023 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Study Protocol: 
RESEARCH DESIGN 
K99 Phase: Aim 1: 
The purpose of the K99 Phase is to identify which e-cigarette ad features most strongly 
influence young adults’ attitudes, susceptibility, and intentions to use e-cigarette. 
 
Participant Recruitment and Screening. We will recruit 65 young adults susceptible to e-
cigarette use to complete the study. Participants will be recruited from the greater Worcester, 
Massachusetts area using email, flyers, and social media, advertising an opportunity to 
participate in a health messaging study. Inclusion criteria are as follows: 1) 18-26 years old and 
2) reporting never trying an e-cigarette, not even a puff. Susceptibility to EC use, will be 
determined using the Susceptibility to Use Tobacco Products questionnaire.13 Only those who 
select “very unlikely” for all three susceptibility questions, will be excluded from the study. All 
others will be considered susceptible to use. 
 
Procedures. Following confirmation of eligibility and informed consent, participants will 
complete sociodemographic questions and a pre-exposure questionnaire. Then participants will 
view an e-cigarette print advertisement that includes one or more of the following popular 
feature categories:7 1) brand, 2) descriptor, 3) modeling, and 4) warning. A monitor on the 
computer will track the participant’s eye movements and two sensors on the participant’s fingers 
will track heart rate and skin conductance. Each advertisement will appear for ten seconds. After 
each advertisement, participants will answer a post-exposure questionnaire with items 
pertaining to perceptions about e-cigarettes. This process will be repeated 14 additional times, 
resulting in a total of 15 different advertisements seen by participants. All methods are 
consistent with accepted standards of psychophysiological measurement for media studies.  
Measures. Psychophysiological measures will include: 1) Visual attention assessed 
using eye-tracking, It will determine dwell time on areas of interest (brand, descriptor, modeling, 
warning) and collect data dwell time, 2) Attention, conceptualized as cognitive resources 
allocated to encode a message into working memory will be operationalized as heart rate, 3) 
Arousal, an indicator of physiological activation in the sympathetic nervous system, will be 
measured by sampling skin conductance. Self-report measures will be collected through 
iMotions, a secure web application for building and managing surveys and collection of 
psychophysiological data. 
 
 Data Analytic Plan: Self-report scores motivation to avoid e-cigarettes were averaged 
for each participant, and then averaged across participants to create a mean score for each 
advertisement and brand. Psychophysiological scores for each construct (i.e., heart rate, skin 
conductance, visual attention) were also averaged across participants to create a mean score 
for each advertisement. The lowest scores for the self-report and heart rate data were ranked 
highest. For visual attention and skin conductance, highest scores were ranked highest. Using a 
multi-attribute decision-making model, we created a decision matrix in which each row (e.g., 
alternative or message) represented an advertisement and each column (attribute) represented 
a construct collected via the self-report or psychophysiological data. The rank of each attribute 
was summed within each message to create a total rank for each message by study type (self-
report, psychophysiological).