Health news sharing is reflected in distributed reward-related brain activity

Neuroimaging has identified individual brain regions, but not yet whole-brain patterns, that correlate with the population impact of health messaging. We used neuroimaging to measure whole-brain responses to health news articles across two studies. Beyond activity in core reward value-related regions (ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex), our approach leveraged whole-brain responses to each article, quantifying expression of a distributed pattern meta-analytically associated with reward valuation. The results indicated that expression of this whole-brain pattern was associated with population-level sharing of these articles beyond previously identified brain regions and self-report variables. Further, the efficacy of the meta-analytic pattern was not reducible to patterns within core reward value-related regions but rather depended on larger-scale patterns. Overall, this work shows that a reward-related pattern of whole-brain activity is related to health information sharing, advancing neuroscience models of the mechanisms underlying the spread of health information through a population.