Clear The Air News Tobacco Blog Rotating Header Image

Cut it out: Smoking scenes in movies DO encourage youngsters to light up

Wednesday, Sep 28 2011

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029433/Films-famous-smoking-scenes-encourage-youngsters-up.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001077

Youngsters determined not to develop a cigarette habit could find their plans going up in smoke if they watch actors light up in movies, claim scientists.

A research team from Imperial College in London argue that there’s a danger young people will mimic what they see on the big screen.

The World Health Organisation does recommend to governments around the world that films with smoking scenes contain an adult rating, but few put the advice into practice.

Suggestive: Youths are more likely to take up smoking if they watch it happening in movies, say researchers. Pictured is Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct

Suggestive: Young people are more likely to take up smoking if they watch it happening in movies, say researchers. Pictured is Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct

Lead researcher Dr Christopher Millett, a senior lecturer at Imperial’s School of Public Health, points out that in fact ‘many governments provide generous subsidies to the U.S. film industry to produce youth-rated films that contain smoking and as such indirectly promote youth smoking’.

There are hundreds of famous smoking scenes in films from Basic Instinct to Bridget Jones, but the report by Dr Millett’s team, published in PLoS Medicine magazine, states that exposure to tobacco imagery in movies is a ‘potent cause of youth experimentation and progression to established smoking’.

It adds: ‘Governments should ensure that film subsidy programmes are harmonised with public health goals by making films with tobacco imagery ineligible for public subsidies.’

Theory at the edge of reason? Could Bridget Jones be unwittingly pushing youngsters into a cigarette habit

Theory at the edge of reason? Scientists believe Bridget Jones could unwittingly be encouraging youngsters into a cigarette habit

This conclusion is backed up by recent research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, which revealed that smokers’ brains ‘light up’ when they see actors puffing away on-screen.

‘When a smoker sees someone smoking, their brain seems to simulate the movements they would make if they were having a cigarette themselves,’ said Todd Heatherton at the Centre for Social Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Potent image: Researchers used Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage, to test the responses of smokers to a character lighting up in a movie

Potent image: Researchers used Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage, to test the responses of smokers to a character lighting up in a movie

Dr Heatherton used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of volunteers watching Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, which contains a lot of smoking scenes.

Reward circuits in the brains of smokers fired up whenever a cigarette in the film was lit.

Simon Chapman from the University of Sydney, also writing in PLoS Medicine, however, argues that the link between smoking in movies and smoking uptake is not a straightforward one and that censorship is not the answer.

Download PDF : PLOSjournal.pmed.1001077

Government Inaction on Ratings and Government
Subsidies to the US Film Industry Help Promote Youth
Smoking.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>