The Positive Impact of Anti-Drug Ads and Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development

Compare and Contrast Essay
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Compare and Contrast Essay
The article The Curiosity Arousing Function of Anti-Drug Ads by Wagner and Sundar (2008) sought to establish the counterproductive effect that anti-drug ads have, given that more researches have focused on the positive impact of anti-drug ads on drug abuse. The authors use the priming effect theory to substantiate their thesis before embarking on the empirical evidence. The study takes two phases, study one with a sample size of 65 high school seniors who were later subdivided into experimental and controlled conditions to expose them to varying stimuli. Study two used a sample size of 28 college students. The results were consistent for both studies that the participants exposed to stimuli containing anti-drug ads developed heightened curiosity on the use of drugs, asserting the priming effect theory.
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study: Imaging acquisition across 21 sites by Casey et al. (2018) recruits kids at their early stages of adolescence and studies their cognitive development concerning drug addiction throughout the adolescence period. The estimated sample size for the study is about 10000 adolescents for an estimated period of 10 years. ABCD study uses high-tech scanning devices and software to carry out the various tasks of the lengthy research. The scan types for the task base fMRI scans undertaken in the study include Rest, EN-Back, Stop Signal Task (SST), and Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) (Casey et al., 2018). The ABCD fMRI study uses the different scan types to study six distinct behavioral domains throughout the adolescence period: reward processing, motivation, impulsivity, impulse control, memory, and emotional regulation (Casey et al., 2018).
The two studies target demographics of almost the same stage of development, adolescents. One common attribute that the two studies aim at is to establish the behavioral response to the menace of drug addiction among the adolescence despite their divergent approaches. Both the studies also use statistical data to substantiate their claim. The controlled portion of the sample is subjected to certain stimuli in both cases. Wagner and Sundar (2008) used an episode of The Simpsons that spoofs Marry Poppin from Disney as a stimulus. Casey et al. (2018), on the other hand, make use of different stimulus for the different scan protocols;...