Psychology 2990A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Smoking Cessation, Risk Perception, Positive Psychology

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2990A/B
• Professor: Doug Hazelwood

Document Summary

Your textbook talked briefly about smoking cessation as it relates to self- efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person"s belief that he/she can master a particular task. Blittner and colleagues (1978) showed that participants who were given a sense of self-efficacy were more likely to quit smoking. This sense of self-efficacy was manipulated simply by the words that the researchers spoke to participants. Obviously, more recent research on smoking cessation has been done since the study by blittner and colleagues (1978) was published. Cigarette packages are labelled with health warnings-written and visual. One strategy by governments around the world to encourage people to quit smoking is graphic labels on cigarette packages that show diseased lungs, individuals weakened by cancer, and children being affected by cigarette smoke. Research on warning labels printed on cigarette packages has shown that fear inducing health warnings might provoke defensive responses. This study investigated whether reformulating statements into questions could avoid defensive reactions.