The influence of mass media on smoking and other human behaviors may make quitting more difficult, according to a recent study, "Spontaneous Action Representation in Smokers When Watching Movie Characters Smoke," conducted by Dartmouth researchers. The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience on Jan. 19, addresses the perceptions of smokers when viewing movies that contain smoking. College psychology professors Todd Heatherton and William Kelley, Dartmouth Medical School professor James Sargent, College graduate student Dylan Wagner and University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network researcher Sonya Cin coauthored the study.
Researchers analyzed the brain mechanisms involved in processing "real-world" conditions such as watching an actor smoke on a movie screen that automatically cue the habit of smoking among smokers, Wagner wrote in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. When smokers watch a movie with smoking scenes, they experience both a craving to smoke and the initiation of brain centers that plan the motor process of lighting a cigarette, he said. Unaware that their smoking habits were being studied, a group of 17 smokers and 17 non-smokers watched "Matchstick Men" (2003) a film that includes scenes of smoking and nonsmoking control scenes while undergoing brain imaging scans, according to the study.
Researchers found that smokers experienced increased activity in regions of the brain that would "be involved in actually planning to have a cigarette" when watching smoking scenes, Heatherton wrote in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
"One of the central findings in psychology is that people are affected by subtle cues, even if they are not aware of those cues," Heatherton wrote. "These cues activate mental representations of behavior, and these mental representations make the behavior more likely to occur. Thus, much of human behavior is influenced by subtle cues from the environment."
Smokers should be aware that watching movies with scenes that involve smoking might urge them to smoke more often, and should thus avoid such situations if they are trying to quit, according to Heatherton.
Researchers still do not know whether smokers will go on to smoke a cigarette after watching a smoking-related movie, Wagner said.
"Research from our colleagues at [Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center] has shown that when smokers are interviewed upon leaving a movie theatre, those that just watched a movie that had smoking in it were more likely to crave cigarettes than smokers who left a non-smoking movie," he said.
Previous research on characters smoking in movies has primarily focused on the rewarding aspects of seeing pictures of cigarettes, according to Wagner.
A study conducted last year by Sargent and three German researchers Reiner Hanewinkel, Barbara Isensee and Matthis Morgenstern found that teens exposed to cigarette image advertising are 46 percent more likely to start smoking. The study, "Cigarette Advertising and Adolescent Smoking," examined the causal association between image advertising and adolescent consumer behaviors and focused on the relationship between cigarette marketing and smoking among people age 10 to 17. The study was published on March 2 in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.
Researchers conducted a cross-sectional survey of over 2,000 school-aged children in Germany and found that youth smoking "is not simply a marker of an adolescent who is generally receptive to marketing."
"It's the actual images that do the trick," Sargent said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Cigarette branding typically employs image advertising, which connects a cigarette brand with a lifestyle, according to Sargent.
"What we're looking at is this idea of image advertising, where marketers center a campaign around an image that associates smoking brands with specific behaviors that kids may find cool, masculine or feminine whatever kids want to be," he said.
In the United States, adolescents are less exposed to tobacco images than in other countries since restrictions on tobacco companies have "pretty much eliminated" cigarette advertising, according to Sargent.
"In Germany, on the other hand, you can still see cigarette advertisements before movies," Sargent said. "If you go to a bus stop, some stops have tobacco imagery on sides of buses or in the bus station itself."
The study's findings also suggest a causal link between image advertising and other social behaviors, such as binge-drinking and unhealthy eating at fast food restaurants, that affect individuals of all ages, Sargent said.
"In the case of fast food advertisement, you can't watch TV without seeing food dripping with cheese, and this affects behavior and how people think of food," Sargent said. "As Americans, we don't want to think this affects behaviors, but it's just not true."
Sargent is currently working with other researchers to conduct a pilot survey of large Southern universities to study the connection between a college student's ability to "decode" alcohol advertisements and the rate of binge drinking they have engaged in during the past month, he said.
"We're trying to figure out how alcohol ads are targeted," Sargent said. "Marketers say campaigns are marketed to people age 21 and older, but we think that those ads are reaching adolescents just as much as young adults."
