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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of independent vs interdependent self-construal in non-smokers’ responses to an anti-smoking message that focuses on either personal or relational consequences of smoking.

Two web-based experimental studies were conducted among US college non-smokers. In the first study, participants’ self-construal was measured. Then participants were randomly assigned to view an anti-smoking message emphasizing either relational or personal consequences of smoking. Message evaluation, smoking attitudes, and behavioral intentions were assessed after message exposure. The second study followed the same procedure except that participants’ self-construal was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to an independent or interdependent self-construal priming task prior to message exposure.

Both studies showed a noticeable pattern of interaction between message focus and self-construal: non-smokers with a salient interdependent self-construal responded more favorably to an anti-smoking message emphasizing personal (vs relational) consequences of smoking whereas non-smokers with a salient independent self-construal responded more favorably to an anti-smoking message emphasizing relational (vs personal) consequences of smoking. However, the interaction effect was small in the first study.

Findings from this study are original in that they run counter to the general belief that messages matching people’s self-perceptions will be more persuasive. On the other hand, matching health risk messages with people’s dominant self-construal may reduce the messages effectiveness due to defensive processing. As a result, communication practitioners should take a great caution of tailoring threatening smoking prevention messages to target audiences’ self-perceptions.

This paper aims to investigate the situational and personal aspects that may trigger smokers’ psychological state reactance. It was hypothesized that situational factors, such as perceived threat to freedom and perceived loss of control, which are supposed to be triggered by an anti-smoking persuasive message, and a personality pattern, such as trait reactance proneness, predict the psychological state reactance.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 246 smoking undergraduate students in two Tunisian business schools. Four anti-smoking print ads, with two different levels of negative emotional intensity, were manipulated.

The findings depict the importance of the anti-smoking ads with a high negative emotional intensity, the perceived threat to freedom and trait reactance proneness in the smokers’ psychological reactance prediction.

This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have combined situational and dispositional factors to explain the smokers’ psychological reactance. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar as they show the importance of the personality factor and the fear appeal in triggering smokers’ anger and negative cognitions that lead, in turn, to the arousal of psychological reactance. This paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication, social psychology and social marketing.

This paper aims to investigate the level of fear experienced by students aged 13 to 30 years, in response to different types of anti‐smoking fear appeals. It seeks to extend and validate Quinn et al.'s study by specifically comparing adolescent and young adult responses to fear appeals.

A total of 548 useable questionnaires were collected via a self‐administered questionnaire based on established scales. Factor analysis, T tests and ANOVA were used to replicate Quinn et al.'s analysis of the data.

The main results are consistent with previous findings that adolescents and non‐smokers experience more fear. Further, general health and factual appeals cause the most fear across all ages but adolescents were more fearful of factual appeals and social ostracism appeals than young adults possibly indicating that factual and social appeals are better targeted at adolescents than young adults. The results were broadly similar to Quinn et al.'s results.

Advertisers often use realistic fear appeals to attract the attention of the intended recipient, to scare the recipient into processing the information, and to get them to act in response to the anti‐smoking message. However, because adolescents and nonsmokers experience more fear, social marketers, governments, schools and parents need to customise fear appeals to suit these recipients.

The current study re‐tests and revalidates the effect of these different appeal types amongst adolescents and young adults. The results will help clarify which type of fear appeal causes more fear amongst adolescents and young adults in Australia, 20 years on from Quinn et al.'s study.

This study aims to examine the different effects that the fear and humor appeals in anti-smoking advertisements for children have on their affective reactions to the advertisements, on their beliefs about smoking and on their behavioral intentions to smoke.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research study conducted in Italy with children aged from 8 to 11 years.

The results indicated that the humor appeal is a useful method for conveying a social theme in a pleasant way and creating a likable character that becomes an example for children to imitate; however, it is necessary to employ the fear appeal to make children reflect carefully about the negative consequences of smoking.

This study examined only children's behavioral intentions derived from anti-smoking advertisements, but future research should also examine their real behaviors after a period following repeated viewing of public service announcements about smoking prevention or other social issues.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Few studies have examined the impact of social advertisements on children, and particularly little is known about the effectiveness of fear appeals on this group.

Tobacco smoking will kill literally millions of people annually around the world. Despite this fact, prevalence among young people remains unacceptably high. Because tobacco is so addictive, the typical adolescent smoker can look forward to a lifetime addiction, reduced quality of life and premature death. A long‐term solution to this problem must include action to postpone or inhibit adolescents from taking up smoking. Advertising research indicates that a message is more effective if the target audience experiences a feeling of involvement in it. It must also communicate new, important information that engages the audience at a cognitive and affective level and is readily verifiable against the audience’s own experience. It follows that the threat of addiction should be used as the key message in a campaign to reduce the incidence of adolescent cigarette smoking. This threat is potentially salient for adolescents. It is concrete and immediate, not merely a promise of increased statistical probabilities 30 or more years into the future. It is also readily verifiable from the adolescent’s own experience. It may also be worth focusing on other consequent losses that flow from the addiction.

High dispositional optimism is often associated with people engaging in behaviour that has adverse effects on their health such as smoking. This study aims to investigate people’s intention to adopt preventive health behaviour by observing the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Two studies have been carried out, first with a UK sample and second with the US sample. The studies examined the effectiveness of anti-smoking ad (appeal: high fear vs low fear), smoking behaviour elicited perception of vulnerability to COVID-19 and dispositional optimism on lowering people’s urge to smoke.

The study findings revealed a high fear appeal ad is more effective in lowering people’s urge to smoke. However, this association is significantly mediated by perception of vulnerability to COVID-19. Further, high dispositional optimism was found to moderate the effect of the anti-smoking ad on the perception of vulnerability to COVID-19, although a comparatively smaller effect was observed for the UK sample. Finally, high dispositional optimism significantly moderated the mediation of vulnerability to COVID-19 on lower urge to smoke only for the US sample.

The study highlights a need for a greater collaborative effort by the public, government, firms in the business of nicotine replacement solutions, socially responsible cigarette and tobacco manufacturing firms and health agencies that may lead to increased preventive health behaviour during the ongoing pandemic.

This study aims to examine the extent to which anti‐smoking websites use intervention strategies that have been informed by four prominent theories of health‐related behavior change: the health belief model, the theory of reasoned action/theory of planned behavior, the transtheoretical model, and social cognitive theory.

Content analysis was applied to 67 unique and independent anti‐smoking websites to determine their use of 20 intervention strategies based on the four theories.

The findings reveal that anti‐smoking websites used the health belief model the most and social cognitive theory the least. In addition, websites devoted to smoking cessation used these theories more extensively than websites devoted to smoking prevention.

The sample size is somewhat small, which may result in lack of sufficient statistical power. Also, the analysis may have overlooked some important intervention strategies that are particularly effective for smoking intervention programs.

Anti‐smoking website designers should take more advantage of the internet as a health promotion medium and use more intervention strategies that have been informed by scientifically tested theories of behavior change, particularly with respect to affective and behavioral strategies.

This study contributes to current knowledge about which kinds of anti‐smoking messages are available online and how extensively they employ theory‐based intervention strategies.

This paper aims to clarify the effect of attitudinal ambivalence on resistance to anti-smoking persuasion through information processing styles. It was hypothesized that a high smoker’s ambivalence, induced by an anti-smoking persuasive message, triggers among smokers both a reflective and a non-reflective information processing. In turn, both the information processing styles were supposed to be predictors of the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 347 smokers in this regard.

The findings indicated that smokers feel ambivalent toward anti-smoking messages in print ads and tend to process them both analytically and superficially. Also, it seems that only the analytical processing triggers resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

The author reports on the importance of attitudinal ambivalence and information processing in the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion process. The paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication and social marketing. This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have highlighted the causal and linear effect of a persuasive anti-smoking message on smokers’ ambivalence, information processing and resistance to persuasion. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar, as they show the importance of the negative emotional appeal in the ambivalence, analytical information processing and resistance triggering.

This research examines how construal level shapes the effectiveness of rational (vs emotional) messages for inducing cessation behaviors. Concrete mindsets foster self-improvement goals, whereas abstract mindsets boost self-relevance goals.

In four studies, this research examines the moderating role of construal level on health messages and the underlying mechanism of goal pursuit.

Results demonstrate that concrete (vs abstract) mindsets increase consumers’ intent to engage in cessation behaviors when exposed to rational (vs emotional) messages. Consistent with this study’s theorizing, the authors found that self-improvement goals underlie the effects for concrete mindsets, whereas self-relevance goals mediate the effects for abstract mindsets.

The reported effects are limited to health messages focusing on cessation behaviors.

This research can help public policymakers to design more effective health messages to foster specific cessation behaviors – quitting smoking and reducing drinking – focusing on concrete (vs abstract) mindsets and rational (vs emotional) messages.

This investigation highlights construal level as an important moderator for message appeals (rational vs emotional) on cessation behaviors, along with the underlying mechanism of goal pursuit, thus contributing to health marketing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the anti‐smoking counselling frequency and its correlates in a sample of Chinese physicians.

In this paper, 268 physicians in Baoding, a city near Beijing, filled out a questionnaire asking about their own smoking status, their anti‐smoking behaviors as well as their opinions on how to reduce cigarette smoking in China.

The paper finds that 54 percent of the male and 8.4 percent of the female physicians were current cigarette smokers. When asked whether they had counselled their patients about cigarette smoking in the past year, 43.7 percent answered “always”; 38.1 percent “often”; 13.1 percent “sometimes”; 2.6 percent “occasionally”, and 2.6 percent said: “not much”. However, only 9.0 percent said that they were “very successful”. Physicians' anti‐smoking counselling practices were highly correlated with their own smoking status; whether they perceived their past anti‐smoking activities as successful; whether they thought that they should set examples by not smoking; whether they felt that they had the responsibility to help patients and whether they perceived themselves as influential in persuading patients to quit smoking.

The paper shows that messages aimed at increasing Chinese physicians' anti‐smoking counselling should appeal to their responsibility, exemplary role, and unique influence on patients' health‐related behaviors.

The paper adds to the few studies on Chinese physicians' cigarette smoking behavior and their anti‐smoking activities. In a country where cigarette smoking is a way of life among males, and few people are aware of the health consequences of cigarette smoking, physicians' efforts can be a spearhead to a cessation campaign.