Evoking a sense of gratitude in smokers can reduce their desire to smoke and motivate them to enroll in a smoking cessation program, Harvard University researchers have found.
What if, instead of focusing on negative emotions, we opted for positive feelings to encourage smoking cessation? A new study reveals that gratitude, which has already been shown to be effective against many ailments, could help people break up with cigarettes.
According to research published July 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencethe act of arousing a feeling of gratitude among smokers contributes to reduce their urge to smoke and increases their likelihood of enrolling in a smoking cessation program.
The Harvard University researchers drew on several studies using various methods to reach this conclusion. While they found that gratitude could have a positive effect on tobacco users, compassion or sadness did not.
“Using nationally representative U.S. samples and an international sample drawn from 87 countries, [les deux premières études] found that gratitude was inversely associated with the likelihood of smoking (…) Others positive emotions (For example, Compassion) did not have such consistent associations, as expected”they write in their scientific article.
Health campaigns should change their register
Given their results, public health campaigns should focus on gratitudethey believe.
“The conventional wisdom in the field was to induce negative emotions in anti-smoking campaigns”said principal investigator Ke Wang, Ph.D. 2024 of Harvard Kennedy School. “Our work suggests that such campaigns should consider inducing gratitude, a positive emotion that triggers cascading positive effects.”
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