Psychology
Smoking: Quitting Means Healthy Motivation
People were more motivated to quit smoking if counselors explored smokers’
personal values, discussed their knowledge of health risks, and supported patients
as they tried to solve their problem.
That’s according to a new University study that tested a Rochester-developed
theory of motivation.
During the past four years, the Smokers’ Health Project, recently awarded
an additional five-year, $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of
Health, invited 1,000 smokers to talk about health, diet, and smoking issues
during a series of counseling sessions.
After four sessions in six months, the smokers were more likely to make serious
attempts to quit and to use medications to help them stop, preliminary results
show.
“The intervention was found to motivate patients to quit whether they
reported wanting to or not at the start,” says Geoffrey Williams, associate
professor at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and the study’s principal
investigator.
The team—which also includes Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, both professors
in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, and Daryl Sharp,
assistant professor and psychiatric nurse practitioner from the School of Nursing—is
exploring how smokers see their health and how the patients’ perspective
on their health may motivate change.
The project was developed to test the use of Self-Determination Theory, a
theory developed by Deci and Ryan that argues that people are inherently motivated
to behave in healthy ways, but other factors sometimes interfere with the motivation.
“We believe that patient autonomy is an essential factor in motivating
effective change in health behavior,” says Deci. “Our approach enhanced
the patients’ feeling of ‘autonomy’ or full agreement with
the actions they were taking in their lives.”
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