Speaker
Description
Introduction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends updated COVID-19 vaccines for the 2024-2025 season, highlighting the importance of vaccination to protect against severe illness and hospitalization. However, vaccine hesitancy remains a significant challenge, impacting the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns and contributing to ongoing infections and outbreaks.
Method. To provide new insights into the psychological mechanisms related to vaccine hesitancy/resistance, we tested the sensorimotor mapping of others’ experiences of vaccination in individuals classified as hesitant or resistant to vaccination. We studied the amplitude of motor-evoked potentials in the deltoid, a relevant muscle for vaccine inoculation, during a computer-based presentation of pictures of individuals receiving the COVID-19 vaccine or other control conditions involving that muscle.
Results. We found a selective increase in the excitability of the deltoid motor cortex in highly vaccine-hesitant individuals compared to low-hesitant individuals when exposed to pictures depicting the inoculation of the COVID-19 vaccine, as opposed to the flu vaccine. Importantly, no difference was reported for the control muscle (extensor carpi radialis).
Discussion. These findings suggest that explicit scenes of COVID-19 vaccine injections trigger a somatotopically based facilitatory mechanism, possibly reflecting an automatic/anticipatory response of avoidance (i.e., a flight response) to the specific compound. A similar facilitation is elicited when viewing fearful/threatening pictures, indicating a potential relevance of this affective experience to explain the observed outcomes.
Keywords: COVID-19 anti-vaccination attitude; Motor evoked potentials; Deltoid; Pictures of COVID-19 vaccine injections;
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