Reducing children’s exposure to food marketing is an important obesity prevention strategy. This narrative review describes current statutory regulations that restrict food marketing; reviews available evidence on the effects of these regulations; and compares policy design elements in Chile and the United Kingdom. Currently, 16 countries have statutory regulations on unhealthy food marketing to children. Restrictions on television advertising, primarily during children’s programming, are most common. Schools are also a common setting for restrictions. Regulations on media such as cinema, mobile phone applications, print, packaging, and the internet are uncommon. Eleven evaluations of policies in 4 jurisdictions found small or no policy-related reductions in unhealthy food advertising, in part because marketing shifted to other programs or venues; however, not all policies have been evaluated. Compared with the United Kingdom, Chile restricts marketing on more products, across a wider range of media, using more marketing techniques. Future research should examine which elements of food marketing policy design are most effective at reducing children’s exposure to unhealthy food marketing.

Background In line with calls for action from international health organizations, Chile implemented in June 2016 a set of regulations to tackle the obesity epidemic. The new regulation includes the mandatory use of front-of-package warning labels on packaged foods/beverages high in energy, sugars, saturated fats and sodium. Additionally, such foods cannot be sold nor offered in daycares/schools and cannot be promoted to children under 14yo. The law is targeted to children; thus, this study examined mothers’ understanding, perceptions, and behaviors associated with the regulation one year after its implementation, using a qualitative approach. Methods Nine focus groups of mothers (7–10 people each) of children (2-14yo) were conducted in July 2017 in Santiago-Chile. They were stratified by socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s age. Macrocodes were developed by three researchers, combining an iterative process of deductive and inductive thematic analyses. Quotations representing each category were selected. Results Mothers understood the new regulation as a policy to fight child obesity and were aware that products with more labels were less healthy than products with fewer labels. Attention and use of labels in the buying decision-making process ranged from participants who did not pay attention to others who relied on them as a quick shortcut (mostly from middle and upper-SES); many mothers indicated changing their purchase habits only when buying new products. Mothers declared that young children accepted school environment changes while teens/preteens resisted them more. Many mothers agreed that schools have become key promoters of food behavioral change. Mothers were less aware about the food marketing regulations. Mothers declared that they perceived that the regulation was changing the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors toward healthier eating patterns. Conclusion After the first year of implementation, the regulation was well known by mothers of diverse SES and different children ages. The degree of use of warning labels was heterogeneous among participants, but most of them agreed that their children, particularly the youngest have positive attitudes toward the regulation and have become promoters of change in their families. Many mothers also expressed that they perceived an important shift toward healthier eating, which may lead to a change in eating social norms. This information contributes to better understand how regulatory actions may influence people’s consumer behaviors.

Two experiments explore the validity of conceptualizing musical beats as auditory structural features and the potential for increases in tempo to lead to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance. In the first experiment, fast-and slow-paced rock and classical music excerpts were compared to silence. As expected, skin conductance response (SCR) frequency was greater during music processing than during silence. Skin conductance level (SCL) data showed that fast-paced music elicits greater activation than slow-paced music. Genre significantly interacted with tempo in SCR frequency, with faster tempo increasing activation for classical music while decreasing it for rock music. A second experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the presumed familiarity of the genre led to this interaction. Although further evidence was found for conceptualizing musical beat onsets as auditory structure, the familiarity explanation was not supported. Music Effects on Arousal -2 Effects of Music Genre and Tempo on Physiological ArousalMusic communicates many different types of messages through the combination of sound and lyric (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2001). For example, music can be used to exchange political information (e.g., Frith, 1981;Stewart, Smith, & Denton, 1989).Music can also establish and portray a self-or group-image (Arnett, 1991(Arnett, , 1992Dehyle, 1998;Kendall & Carterette, 1990;Dillman Carpentier, Knobloch & Zillmann, 2003;Manuel, 1991;McLeod, 1999; see also Hansen & Hansen, 2000). Pertinent to this investigation, music can communicate emotional information (e.g., Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). In short, music is a form of "interhuman communication in which humanly organized, non-verbal sound is perceived as vehiculating primarily affective (emotional) and/or gestural (corporeal) patterns of cognition" (Tagg, 2002, p. 5).This idea of music as communication reaches the likes of audio production students, who are taught the concept of musical underscoring, or adding music to "enhance information or emotional content" in a wide variety of ways from establishing a specific locale to intensifying action (Alten, 2005, p. 360). In this realm, music becomes a key instrument in augmenting or punctuating a given message. Given the importance of arousal and/or activation in most theories of persuasion and information processing, an understanding of how music can be harnessed to instill arousal is arguably of benefit to media producers looking to utilize every possible tool when creating messages, whether the messages are commercial appeals, promotional announcements or disease-prevention messages. It is with the motivation of harnessing the psychological response to music for practical application that two experiments were conducted to test whether message creators can rely on musical tempo as a way to increase sympathetic nervous system Music Effects on Arousal -3 activation in a manner similar to other structural features of media (i.e., cuts, edits, sound effects, voice changes). Before ex...

This study describes a culturally sensitive approach to engage Mexican origin families in a school-based, family-focused preventive intervention trial. The approach was evaluated via assessing study enrollment and intervention program participation, as well as examining predictors of engagement at each stage. Incorporating traditional cultural values into all aspects of engagement resulted in participation rates higher than reported rates of minority-focused trials not emphasizing cultural sensitivity. Family preferred language (English or Spanish) or acculturation status predicted engagement at all levels, with less acculturated families participating at higher rates. Spanish-language families with less acculturated adolescents participated at higher rates than Spanish-language families with more acculturated adolescents. Other findings included two-way interactions between family language and the target child's familism values, family single- vs. dual-parent status, and number of hours the primary parent worked in predicting intervention participation. EDITORS' STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS: The authors present a promising approach-which requires replication-to engaging and retaining Mexican American families in a school-based prevention program. The research also highlights the importance of considering acculturation status when implementing and studying culturally tailored aspects of prevention models.

This research investigates the role of perceived health knowledge on the effectiveness of fear-based persuasive appeals. Undergraduates (N = 263) read a strong fear, weak fear, or efficacy-only message encouraging breast or testicular self-examination. As expected, results indicated that men high in subjective knowledge were less reactant and more persuaded by the efficacy-only message whereas those low in subjective knowledge did not evidence this pattern. Contrary to expectation, women high in subjective knowledge had comparable reactions to each of the 3 messages. Implications for fear appeal theory and message design are discussed.