We’ve all heard about the United States Food and Drug Administration’s new graphic warning labels for cigarette cartons. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here. Whether or not you support this type of advertising, you have to wonder — will it work? According to researchers from the University of Bonn, non-smokers thinking of taking up the habit might think twice when they look at those pictures, but it’s going to require more than scare tactics to change the ways of chronic smokers.

In an experiment, the researchers asked 28 smokers in their mid 20’s who had been smoking an average of 17 cigarettes per day for at least five years and 28 non-smokers from the same demographic to look at pictures of happy, fearful and neutral faces. As the subjects looked at these images, the researchers scanned their brains, paying special attention to any activity in the amygdala — a small part of the brain known to play a major role in fear and threat perception.

When the participants looked at the fearful faces, the researchers found that the amygdala activity in smokers was the same as in non-smokers. Interestingly, when the researchers repeated the experiment with the smokers after they had abstained from smoking for 12 hours overnight, the smokers had significantly less activity in their amygdalas. The more severe their addictions, the less responsive were their amygdalas.

“Our results may thus point to a neural mechanism, which is not inherently addictive per se, but might support addictive behavior by compromising threat perception and self-preservation abilities. Furthermore, threat perception deficits during unprovoked abstinence-induced nicotine cravings could undermine public health awareness campaigns based on fear appeals (e.g., warning labels on cigarette packaging, alarming advertisings depicting the fatal consequences of cigarette smoking in many people) from having their intended effect to promote smoking avoidance behavior.”

I guess we can add one more thing to the long list of the negative effects of smoking — lower sensitivity to fear and threat perception when nicotine cravings kick in. So warning labels and frightening statistics (like 50% of the 1.2 billion smokers in the world will die early of some smoking-related ailment) might prevent non-addicts, but if we’re looking for a way to deter chronic smokers from picking up another pack, it may take more creativity.

Photo: Roman Pavlyuk, Flickr, CC