Positive Language Helps Smokers Quit
Reported January 08, 2010
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A new study suggests smokers who call into a quitline have more success when spoken to in a positive tone.
A new study conducted at Yale University describes a relationship between stressing the benefits of quitting smoking — a gain-framed approach — versus stressing the potential losses of quitting smoking with actual quitting success rates.
Researchers assessed specialists from a New York State Smokers’ quitline and determined those smokers who received the gain-framed messages were significantly more likely to attempt to quit and had a higher rate of abstinence from smoking.
“The fidelity outcomes from this study should encourage quitlines to test novel counseling strategies for their ability to increase smoking cessation rates and, thus, prevent cancer,” study authors wrote.
“Quitline program directors need more specific evidence concerning the types of counseling strategies that are most effective and how to maximize the use of pharmacotherapies,” Robert T. Croyle, Ph.D., of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., wrote.
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, January 7, 2010