The Relationship between Smoking Motivation and Attentional Bias of College Students as indexed by eye movement pattern

[[abstract]]Due to the heavy damage to health, governments around the world promote smoking cessation in full strength. Despite the activities of smoking cessation in years, high percentage of college students keep the habit of smoking. There are many reasons contributing to the failure in smoking cessation, including the exposure to smoking related information in daily life, stress and other motivational factors. How these factors influence smoking motivation means a lot for smoking cessation. Thus, present study investigates the following questions with eye tracker: 1. Is there any difference in attentional bias between smoker and non-smoker? 2. Do temporary cessation and anxiety affect attentional bias to smoking related stimuli? One hundred and five Asia University students were recruited as research participants. Smoking related and unrelated pictures prepared by the researcher were used as experimental material. Experiment 1 investigated whether the difference in attentional bias existing between two-hour-cessation smoker and non-smoker or not. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of elevated anxiety level on attentional bias of two-hour-cessation smoker. Experiment 3 investigated the difference in performance in dot-probe task among two-hour-cessation smoker with or without elevated anxiety level and non-smoker. Smokers in experiment 1 shifted the attention toward smoking-related pictures, but did not show any attentional bias. Smokers with elevated anxiety level showed a strong attentional bias toward smoking-related pictures. Both smokers with/without elevated anxiety level showed attentational bias toward smoking related pictures, but not non-smokers. The above results demonstrated that without the empowered effect of anxiety or stress, smoker with two-hour-cessation showed no attentaional bias. Dot-probe task is a sensitive tool in measuring attentional bias. The relationships among cessation length, smoking addiction level, years of smoking and attentional bias, and comparison of different tasks for measuring attentional bias are expected to be clarify in future studies