July 24, 2024 – Gratitude appears to play a role in helping smokers reduce their urge to smoke, according to a new study co-authored by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and colleagues from Harvard Kennedy School.
The study also found that gratitude can increase the likelihood that a smoker will enroll in a smoking cessation program.
The paper was published July 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Harvard Chan School co-authors included Vaughan Rees, senior lecturer on social and behavioral sciences and director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control, and Ichiro Kawachi, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology.
Using evidence from several types of studies, the researchers found consistent links between feelings of gratitude and lower rates of smoking. For instance, in nationally representative samples from the U.S. and in a global sample, those with higher levels of gratitude were less likely to smoke. Experimental studies revealed similar connections, showing that inducing feelings of gratitude in adult smokers was linked with reducing their craving to smoke and increasing their enrollment in an online smoking cessation program.
“The evidence was striking,” said Rees. “Inducing gratitude influences decisions on smoking that are consistent with smoking less and higher motivation to quit. Unfortunately, gratitude is seldom evoked in anti-smoking communication campaigns, which often induce sadness—an emotion that increases cravings to smoke. These findings offer new theory-guided strategies to enhance the impact of public health communication campaigns.”
Read a Kennedy School article about the study: Harvard Researchers Find That Gratitude Is a Useful Emotional Tool in Reducing Desire to Smoke: Key Implications for Public Health Campaigns
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