The long range impact of current regulatory and legal initiatives designed to curb adolescent smoking are difficult to gauge. Children and adolescents will continue to be exposed to conflicting advertisements and messages, both pro- and anti-tobacco, and one-quarter of those individuals will proceed beyond experimentation with tobacco products in regular use. In the face of this clear public health crisis, how can prevention interventions be directed to help curb adolescent smoking? An answer may come from understanding the way in which adolescents cognitively process both pro and anti-tobacco advertising.
The specific aims of this research are to: 1) Examine the role of specific effects of the susceptibility of adolescents to cigarette advertising. We hypothesize: 1) that advertising that is consistent with the predominant self-schema of adolescents will be processed more efficiently, regardless of the content of the advertisements, compared to advertising content that is inconsistent with the content of the self-schema; 2) stronger effects will be observed for older adolescents. We proposed to test these hypotheses in a sample of 60 male and female adolescents (30 participants ages 10-13; 25 participants, ages 14-17) in a 2 (age group) X 2 (advertising-schema match: consistent inconsistent) X 3 (advertising product: pro-tobacco; anti-tobacco: neutral) design. Age group will be the between subjects factor, and advertising-schema match and advertisement type will e within subjects factors. During Session 1, participants will identify the predominant self- schema by describing themselves in bipolar adjective rating scales and also will complete questionnaires. During a Session 2, participants will respond in a computer screen to the six types of information represented by the within subjects factors. Reaction time to the stimuli and advertisement preference will be the main dependent variables of interest. The results of this study will have implications for understanding the mechanism through which difference type of advertising information is processed, and will suggest directions for prevention efforts to proceed in the future.
