Saturday, December 13, 2008

Inhaling fear

This writer suggests that smoking warnings actually trigger cravings.

There's something a little too neat and a little too certain about his op-ed, particularly from a study of 32 subjects.

It's easy to imagine how a warning that contains the words cigarettes, tobacco or smoking might trigger craving. It's a little more difficult to understand how an image of a tumorous lung would provoke craving, unless subjects have been desensitized to the image and have developed an association between the image and a cigarette. The op-ed suggests that all warnings are useless, but only explicitly addresses subject response to the text warnings.

I tried to learn a little more about the author, but the Wikipedia page on his was deleted because it was deemed to be blatant advertising.

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