earticle

영어

Objectives: The purpose of this research is to understand emotional responses and perceptions about pictorial cigarette health warnings in Korea. Methods: This study conducted focus group interviews with adult men, adult women, and male adolescents, asking the participants about their emotional reactions and thoughts regarding pictorial cigarette health warning images. Results: This study found that participants frequently mention negative emotions such as disgust and guilt upon exposure to cigarette health warning images. Participants also cited perceived relevance between themselves and warning images, and perceived relevance between smoking and warning images in order to select effective images for smoking prevention and cessation. In particular, as participants experienced more disgust and relevance to themselves from warnings, they were more likely to consider smoking cessation and prevention. In addition, guilt was frequently mentioned among female and adolescent participants after exposed to the image of fetus secondhand smoke. Conclusion: We suggest that pictorial cigarette health warning theme selection should be based on 1) images with potential to elicit negative emotions, such as those depicting externally noticeable diseases and secondhand smoke, and 2) realistic problems directly related to smoking.