Smoking-related Pictures For Undergraduate Smokers On Attentional Bias: An Eye Movement Study

Adolescents smoking has been one of the hot issues of social researches. A lot of researches showthat adolescents take actions to smoke, to some extent, out of curiosity, peer influence, communication,avoiding aloneness etc. With the development of society, people have already realized the negativeconsequences tobacco brings to human health and environmental hygiene. Stay away from tobaccobecomes a brand new life style in the world gradually. According to the data released by Ministry of Healthin2008, the number of Chinese smoker has been up to350,000,000, of which adolescent smoker is about15,000,000. The number of adolescents who try smoking is no less than40,000,000. At the same time, theChinese government promised to ban on smoking at all public areas since the beginning of2011.Overseas researches on adolescent smokers mainly focus on attentional bias in recent years, whichindicate that there is a close relationship between addiction and attentional bias. However, domesticresearchers pay more attention to the structure of teenage smoking and putting forward some correspondingmeasures to ban smoking, but less cognitive study. The research hypothesis is that the college students whosmoke may have some attentional bias on smoking-related pictures. This study divided into two parts, firstpart is selecting eligible subjects through a questionnaire; the second part is selecting subjects to take partin the experiments. The study applies eye tracker to record the stimulating eye movement of the subjectswhile they are observing the smoking-related pictures, and aims at investigating subjects' cognitive bias oncigarette picture stimulus.Results indicated as follows:First, there does not exist attentional bias on smoking-related pictures for students who don't smoke,that is, they pay the same attention to smoking-related pictures as much as to other pictures, and there areno difference between male students and female ones.Second, college student smokers have attentional bias on smoking-related pictures while paying littleattention to pictures irrelevant to cigarette. They, male or female, have observably different reaction todifferent smoking-related pictures and watch those pictures significantly longer than cigarettes irrelevantones, and more likely to pay attention to smoking-related pictures.Third, college students who are inclined to smoke do not have attentional bias on smoking-related pictures. There are no differences between the time they watch smoking-related pictures andsmoking-unrelated pictures. Male and female subject have significantly different reaction to differentpictures. Female ones have inclination to look at smoking-unrelated pictures.Fourth, college students who are inclined to smoke watch smoking-related pictures longer thannonsmokers do, but shorter than smokers do.