Researchers find that gratitude is a useful emotional tool in reducing the desire to smoke

Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of premature death. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ScienceHarvard researchers report findings that evoking feelings of gratitude in people who smoke helps reduce their urge to smoke and increases the likelihood that they will participate in a smoking cessation program. They note that these findings could inspire newer approaches to public health messaging campaigns aimed at reducing so-called “appetitive” risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking and drug use.

The research team built on the Assessment tendency frameworka theoretical model of emotional and decision making, and previous experimental studies on the connection between emotions and risk behavior to hypothesize that inducing the specific positive emotion of gratitude could reduce smoking. Previous meta-analyses had concluded that positive emotions have no effect on this type of behavior.

“The conventional wisdom in the field has been to induce negative emotions in anti-smoking campaigns,” said lead researcher Ke Wang, Ph.D. from the Harvard Kennedy School. 2024. “Our work suggests that such campaigns should induce gratitude, a positive emotion that produces cascading positive effects.”

Through a series of multi-method studies, researchers found consistent evidence that inducing feelings of gratitude was linked to lower smoking behavior. Nationally representative surveys in the US and a global sample found that higher levels of gratitude correlated with a lower likelihood of smoking, even when other known causes of smoking were taken into account.

Experimental studies have further demonstrated causality. Inducing feelings of gratitude in adults who smoke significantly reduced their self-reported urge to smoke, while inducing feelings of compassion or sadness did not have these beneficial effects. Crucially, inducing gratitude also increased participants’ enrollment in an online smoking cessation program, demonstrating effects on actual smoking cessation behavior.

These findings create opportunities to reconsider the scientific foundations of anti-smoking campaigns. The researchers examined the largest federally funded public anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately, this groundbreaking campaign has rarely led to gratitude.

Instead, it has usually produced emotions such as sympathy, sadness and compassion – three emotions that may not have the intended effects on smoking cessation behavior. In the case of sadness, previous research by the research team found that evoking sadness actually increases the desire to smoke, as well as the intensity with which smokers inhale immediately after the emotion is activated.

“Compared to how much money tobacco companies spend on advertising, public health campaigns have paltry budgets; they have to get the most out of every dollar,” says Professor Jennifer Lerner.

“The theoretically grounded and empirically tested framework presented here will hopefully help public health officials design more effective public media campaigns across a broad spectrum of attractive risk behaviors that have underlying emotional components.”

Unlike other positive emotions (e.g., happiness, compassion, and hope), gratitude has the unique quality of making people less likely to seek immediate gratification and more focused on long-term relationships and health. The research team states that this unique effect is related to the influence of the emotion on smoking behavior and the desire to quit.

The researchers believe that designing public health messaging campaigns to more effectively inspire gratitude could help them have a greater impact on reducing smoking rates and other risky health behaviors.