Engagement Science Lab

04/26/2026

Congratulations to our founder and president, Elizabeth Edwards, on being named a 2026 Top Woman in PR & Communications by PR NEWS — recognized in the Industry Champions category 🎉

Each year, PR News honors an elite group of women shaping the future of communication. The Industry Champions distinction recognizes women whose impact on the direction and advancement of the PR and communications industry reaches well beyond their individual organizations — and that is the work Elizabeth has been doing for twenty-five years.

She is the originator of the Affective Intelligence framework — the convergence-science model that reclassifies the cognitive bias canon as adaptive instinct on spectra and establishes communication as biological intervention rather than information transfer.

She is the originator of PR 3.0, the strategic communication framework for the era in which AI systems synthesize, summarize, and redistribute what is known about every organization.

She was recently elected President of PR Consultants Group, named a featured keynote speaker at Progress MartechNEXT alongside Neil Patel and Scott Brinker, and continues to serve as a lead Behavioral Science Communicator and ethical AI speaker for PRSA, IABC, NSPRA, SPRF, and CAPIO.

What makes Elizabeth an Industry Champion in the truest sense is her conviction that communication is not a soft skill or a nice-to-have, but a science with measurable consequences for human health, organizational trust, and the integrity of public discourse — and that the profession has both the responsibility and the tools to lead the AI era on the right side of that line. 🧠 🎙️ ✨

Honorees will be celebrated at the Top Women Awards Celebration on June 4, 2026, at Current in New York City.

Congratulations, Elizabeth, from all of us at Volume Public Relations, Engagement Science Lab, and The Affect Institute. The industry is better for the work you do, and we are honored to do it alongside you.

More on the 2026 honorees: https://www.prnewsonline.com/go/top-women-in-pr-2026/

04/12/2026

If communication shapes the biological conditions under which people can think — then influence is not neutral. And we need a way to tell the difference between communication that helps and communication that harms.

On the left: legitimate influence. Communication that preserves agency, allows complexity, and expands reasoning and choice. Effect: builds system capacity and trust.

On the right: exploitative influence. Communication that triggers urgency and fear, collapses nuance, and compresses processing capacity. Effect: degrades system function and collective reason.

Communication that expands capacity produces durable trust, sustainable engagement, and sound decision-making. Communication that compresses capacity might spike a metric — but it degrades the audience’s ability to reason and trust over time.

As a consumer — judge the media, messaging, and leadership communication you encounter. Is it expanding your capacity or compressing it?

As a communicator — evaluate your own work. Are you building coherence or distorting instinct?

The world spent billions on bias training that failed because it framed instincts as defects. It spent decades optimizing engagement without understanding that engagement optimization often means capacity compression at the biological level.

There is a better way. And the framework for it exists. Read the full essay: https://vist.ly/4y7kr

04/12/2026

Communication is not information transfer — it is biological intervention.

Follow the pathway from left to right:

1. An external signal enters — language, framing, social context, repeated messaging

2. The brain’s predictive and survival systems filter it before conscious thought even begins

3. That signal triggers physiological cascades — autonomic nervous system shifts, cortisol signaling through the endocrine system, inflammatory responses through the immune system

4. Those biological changes determine cognitive and behavioral capacity — what you can perceive, consider, connect with, remember, and choose

This isn’t metaphor. This is psychoneuroimmunology. Replicated across labs and contexts for decades.

Repeated communication patterns reliably alter the biological systems that govern perception, consideration, connection, motivation, memory, and choice — making influence not neutral, but causal.

Every argument you’ve had with someone you love. Every news cycle you’ve sat through. Every time a leader chose fear over clarity. Every algorithm that fed you outrage because it kept you scrolling. Every marketing message rushing you to hurry.

All of it was conditioning. All of it was shaping instinct. All of it was moving you along the spectra — toward healthy expression or toward distortion.

We have been shaping each other’s capacity to think, feel, connect, and choose for our entire lives. Mostly without knowing it.

Read full essay and framework
and what it means for leadership and communication professionals: https://vist.ly/4y6hb

04/11/2026

What if confirmation bias isn’t a flaw? 🧠 What if it’s actually the distorted pole of a healthy instinct — one that sits on a spectrum, with adaptive function at the center and conditioned extremes on either end?

Look at this chart. Three instincts. Three spectra. The same structural pattern every time.

Take the first one. At the healthy center: provisional sensemaking — the ability to hold what you know loosely enough to keep learning, but firmly enough to function. You need this every day.

Push it one direction through environments that punish uncertainty, and you get premature certainty. Rigidity. The thing we’ve been calling “confirmation bias.”

Push it the other direction through environments that erode all trust, and you get epistemic collapse. Cynicism. Nothing is knowable.
Same instinct. Two distortions. Neither one caused by a flaw in your wiring. Both caused by the communication environments that conditioned you.

Now look at the third spectrum — epistemic delegation. The healthy center is your ability to decide who’s worth trusting. Distort it one way: blind deference. Distort it the other: reflexive rejection. No one is trustworthy. Every expert is lying. Every institution is corrupt.

Does that sound like anything happening in the world right now?

This is the instinct reclassification at the heart of Affective Intelligence. And it maps across the entire bias canon.

The full framework with the science, the evidence, and what this means for how we communicate, lead, and influence: https://vist.ly/4y5uq

04/11/2026

Bias research is so biased — the whole field of research has been misclassified 🧠 For over a century, the dominant model of human behavior has looked like the image on the left: you are a logic machine with flaws. Your biases are bugs. Your instincts are errors. Your departures from rationality are defects to be catalogued and corrected.

Fifty years of behavioral science was built on that frame. Brilliant research. Extraordinary data. But interpreted through a lens that could only see non-rational behavior as irrational behavior.

The image on the right is what the same data looks like when you correct the frame.

You are not a logic machine with flaws. You are an adaptive system in an environment.

Your decision-making is governed by affect — the integrated biological, psychological, and social configuration that determines what is possible for you in any given moment. What you can perceive, consider, connect with, remember, and choose.

What we’ve been calling biases are actually adaptive instincts — shaped not by personal weakness, but by the communication environments that condition them over time.

This is the Affective Intelligence paradigm shift. And it changes everything about how we understand human behavior.

We recently published the foundational essay on this. Twenty-five years of research. The first public articulation of the full framework shared in preparation for the forthcoming book. But we can’t wait for the book.

Read it here: https://affectiveintelligence.substack.com

04/07/2026

Next week, April 14th our trainings are coming online 🌎 For the first time this one is for everyone from anywhere.

💻 Our President Elizabeth Edwards is leading a four-session AI Mastermind Webinar Series with PRSAPhoenix starting April 14. Session one digs into AI tools and workflows for your daily work — prompting, content creation, research, media strategy. Real skills you can use the same day.

This is for communicators at every level — agency, corporate, nonprofit, government, independent, small business. Whether you've been experimenting with AI for a while or you're just getting started, there's something powerful here for you.

You can register for a single session or grab the full four-session package. And it's not limited to PRSA Phoenix members, anyone can join 🌎 Recordings will be available if you can't make it live.

🔗 Session one: https://lnkd.in/gJfer3DX

🔗 Four-session package: https://lnkd.in/gCMUndex

We love teaching this material and watching how it transforms everyone who learns it. Come learn with us, it may be one of the most important trainings you take this year 🚀

Take your AI skills to the next level! Join us for the AI Mastermind Webinar Series for PR Professionals, a four-part series created for PR professionals who want to boost their AI knowledge base led by Elizabeth Edwards.

Register for the full series at a bundled discount or sign up for individual sessions that fit your schedule. Whether you’re in an agency, corporate team, government office, nonprofit or independent, each session delivers practical tools to help you strengthen your work and stay ahead.

April 14, May 19, June 16, July 14 | 9:30 to 11 a.m.

Don’t miss this chance to enhance your AI expertise and apply it directly to your work!

Register for the full series here, starting April 14: https://phoenixprsa.starchapter.com/meetinginfo.php?id=107&ts=1773962239

04/07/2026

Our founder Elizabeth Edwards is keynoting the Northwest Communicators Conference in Portland on April 16 with “Public Relations 3.0, AI and the New Trust Economy: The Science, the Signals, and the New Architecture of Human Belief.”

AI isn’t just changing how people search for information — it’s changing how they make meaning, how they communicate, and how they trust. For communication professionals, that shift redefines the strategic value of our work.

PR 3.0 maps the new intelligence layer our industry is now operating in — and why communicators hold more influence right now than at any point in the history of the field.

Thank you PRSA Oregon for a powerhouse lineup. See you in Portland.

AND THE PRSA Oregon NW Communicators Conference LINEUP IS LIVE ON OUR SITE!
 
For two days, CommCon is bringing together headliners, industry disruptors and strategic masterminds for a professional development experience designed to elevate your impact and your career.
 
HEADLINERS
Mark Mohammadpour, APR, Fellow PRSA – Chasing the Sun’s Chief Wellness Officer
Nigel Jaquiss – Oregon Journalism Project’s Pulitzer-prize winning senior investigative reporter
Elizabeth Edwards - Volume PR & Engagement Science Lab
Katie Garcia – Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership
And that’s just the top of the bill.
 
We also have Jenny Jeffries with Athletes Unlimited, Jenny Nguyen, owner of the The Sports Bra, Kacie Van Stiphout of the Portland Thorns FC, and Kimberley Veale of the Portland Fire discussing the Portland-led women’s sports revolution.
 
Also taking the stage:
Langley Allbritton, AI Comms Consulting
Colby Reade, MPS, APR, M.J. Murdoch Charitable Trust
Amanda Staggenborg, Ed.D., Mount Angel Abbey
Ms. Rhonda Morin, APR, Oreon Health and Science University
Sally (Gilpin) Ridenour, APR, Fellow PRSA, Oregon Department of Transportation
Greg Eppich – PRR
Leigh-Ann Eng – PRR
Samantha Swaim Swaim – Swaim Strategies
Jim Lukaszewski, APR, Fellow PRSA, The Lukaszewski Group
Tom Unger, ABC, APR, Fellow PRSA
Kelly Guenther – Guenther Group
Jen Maxwell-Muir, Maxwell
Jacque Coe, APR, Fellow PRSA
Rashaad O’Neal, Puyallup School District
Taraneh Fultz, APR
Anne Thwaits, Benton County
Carly Johansen Fredericks, Benton County
Jess Columbo, Social for Good
Samantha Harmon, LHH Recruitment Strategies
Salomé Chimuku, Multnomah County Democrats & Art By Esoko
University of Oregon students:
Sam Rinaldi
Madison Price
Allie Geraci-Novy
Denali Williams

If you want to stay competitive, relevant and influential in today’s communications landscape, this is the room you want to be in.

Registration is open at prsaoregon.org. Seats are limited.

Special thanks to and , whose input and assistance has been fantastic!

08/01/2025

Join us in Little Rock for the inaugural AI in Arkansas Conference with a keynote, tools workshop, and Q&A on powerful, responsible, and maximum effect AI with our founder, Elizabeth Edwards and Arkansas PRSA

It's the first conference of its kind in the state, covering everything from strategic AI integration to bias elimination to building AI teams. But here's one lesson you can use right now:

Most organizations are approaching AI backwards.

They're asking "How can AI help us do what we're already doing?" instead of "How can AI help us think differently about what's possible?"

The companies getting real competitive advantage aren't just automating tasks—they're using AI to expand their strategic thinking, reduce cognitive load on routine decisions, and amplify human creativity rather than replace it.

The shift: Stop being a passenger with AI (passively traveling along hoping it goes somewhere useful) and start being the driver (dynamically directing this superengine to take you further, faster, and with more fun).

This mindset change is the foundation for everything else—ethical implementation, effective prompting, building AI teams, eliminating bias loops. Because when you're intentional about the role AI plays in your thinking, you make better decisions about how to use it responsibly.

At the conference, we're going deep on the frameworks and tools to make this practical: How to claim your AI advantage while keeping human potential at the center. How to use behavioral science to make AI communication actually resonate. How to build teams of specialized AI apprentices.

If you're in Arkansas (or willing to travel), come learn how to move from AI user to AI strategist. Registration closes August 8: https://vist.ly/3zxxv

And if you've got a team or organization that needs to level up their AI game responsibly, let's talk. My team and I help businesses create sustainable AI advantages built on behavioral science, not just the latest shiny tool.

What's your biggest question about using AI strategically in your work?

07/16/2025

Communication is going through a revolution. We're graduating from the Behavioral Age to the Affective Age.

For decades, we've understood influence through Behavioral Economics: nudges, cognitive biases, rational actors making irrational decisions. But there is a the deeper system.

Affect isn't just emotion. It's influence and decision infrastructure.

It's the precognitive system that codes for meaning, safety, and connection before cognition even begins. It operates across individuals, relationships, institutions, and entire cultures.

When we tune engagement to the dynamics of this system, we influence behavior more successful from a place of harmony rather than harm:

• Marketing becomes about resonance, not manipulation

• Leadership becomes about attunement, not authority

• Communication becomes about frequency matching, not feature pushing

At the National School Public Relations Association conference in DC next week, our founder is teaching how the latest affective science transforms how we understand and practice influence—moving from "behavioral targeting" to "affective attunement" with “instinctive intelligence”.

The goal isn't to control responses. It's to create Resonant Influence—communication that leaves everyone healthier.

The question isn't whether you're having an affect. The question is: what kind?

12/06/2024

💡 Want to take your writing up a level?

Join us on December 10th for the Ragan Writing and Content Strategy Virtual Conference—a one-day event packed with tools and techniques to help you create more memorable, impactful communication. And since it’s virtual, attend from anywhere!

Our founder, Elizabeth Edwards, will share insights from the Neuroscience of Connection, revealing how to:

✅ Tune your language to deepen resonance with readers.

✅ Science-backed techniques to tune content for maximum memorability.

Whether you’re a writer, marketer, or strategist, this event will leave you with an entirely new toolkit to help build connection and boost the effectiveness of your communication.

📅 Details:
• Date: December 10th
• Session: Mundane to Magnificent: Adding Creativity and Joy Back to Your Writing
• Read more on our blog: https://volumepr.com/join-volume-pr-president-at-ragan-writing-content-strategy-conference/
• Register Here: https://www.ragan.com/store/writing-and-content-strategy-virtual-conference/

Don’t miss this opportunity to sharpen your skills and discover the art and science behind truly resonant communication.

Ragan Communications -communications