Contexts of cognitive dissonance in campaigns designed to prevent substance abuse

摘要

Both at a micro and macro level, the substance abuse phenomenon has a great impact on the social evolution of teenagers. The online platforms, which support the abuse through persuasive binary constructs, of a textual and visual nature alike, create identitarian delusions among teenage abusers of substances through a transformative process of their personal opinions and convictions. When the teenager starts to look for arguments in order to maintain the generated transformation, namely the substance abuse, therein lies a psychological tension between the generated acquisition and the personal opinions and convictions. Hence, the young substance abuser will try to decrease the cognitive dissonance by searching new cognitions which should diminish the dissonant elements. It is at this stage when the prevention efforts assume the role of de-/re-coding these delusions, so that the magnitude of the dissonance would decrease.We shall analyse two online platforms and two prevention campaigns using two research methods: content analysis and functional grammar in order to fulfill a three-fold purpose: identify the textual and visual elements, for both the online platforms and the prevention campaigns; to map out associative representations made up of textual and/or visual elements, with a high persuasive potential; to pinpoint the nodes of these representative systems so that one could use them in the de-/re-coding process of the identitarian delusions.