The motivational effects of thinking and worrying about the effects of smoking cigarettes

Abstract

We tested a strategy to encourage cigarette smokers to think more frequently about the negative consequences of smoking, reasoning that increased thought might lead to greater worry and motivation to quit. College students who smoked daily were randomly assigned to one of three conditions in which they wore watches for one week that sounded an alarm randomly four times each day. When alerted, the students read one of eight cards that either had a written statement about studying (control condition), a statement about the negative effects of smoking behaviour (text condition), or a negative smoking statement accompanied by a picture (e.g., a blackened lung; image condition). Measures collected at week's end revealed that the smoking cards had no effects on perceived risk, but they increased worry and reports of intrusive thoughts, and had a small but reliable effect on plans to quit. Correlational data also supported the relationship between worry and motivation to quit, and we discuss the possible benefits of “normal” worrying and strategies for capitalising on the worry–motivation relationship to encourage smokers to abandon cigarettes.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grants R01 CA098962, R01 CA58659, and K05 CA92633 from the National Cancer Institute.

We wish to thank Matt Chaussee, Melissa Seefeld, Heidi Francis, and Jennifer Armstrong for their help in conducting these experiments.

Notes

¹It is not necessarily the case that the intrusive thoughts that smokers reported were always negative. Researchers have shown that smoking cues can be perceived as pleasant (e.g., Geier, Mucha, & Pauli, 2000), and at least some of the thoughts that “popped into” smokers’ heads could have been positive. However, intrusive thoughts did correlate with reported worry (r=.30), and we suspect that the wording of some of the thoughts (e.g., “I had trouble falling asleep because of pictures or thoughts about the effects of smoking that came into my mind”) encouraged smokers to think of unpleasant intrusions.