Blame it on others? Deliberative and automatic processes in the effect of social norms and group identification in smoking behavior.
Ph.D researcher: Sabina Isabel Estêvão Pereira
Supervisors: Maria Luísa Lima1, Paulo Vitória1,2 & Hein De Vries3 (1Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social, Lisboa, Portugal; 2Faculdade de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal; 3Department of Health Education and Health Promotion, Research School Caphri, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands)
Co-researchers: /
Funding: PD/BD/113468/2015 PhD grant from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) in the Doctoral Program Lisbon PhD in Social Psychology (LiSP).
Objective: The present research project aims to contribute to clarify the socio-cognitive processes that take part in the relationship between social relationships and health, through the approach of Social Psychology of Health. Specifically, it aims to understand the role of social norms and social identity in the smoking behavior of youth, arguing that the social norms of groups with whom participants identify moderate the relationship between stress and smoking behavior, at both an automatic and deliberative level. Thus, our main goals are:
Examine the impact of social norms on teenagers’ smoking behavior and the moderating role of social identity in this relationship, at the level of deliberative processes;
Examine the impact of stress on implicit measures of smoking behavior in the same population;
Examine if the impact of stress on implicit measures of smoking behavior is moderated bu the mental activation of social norms from the groups with whom participants identify themselves.
Method: We will analyze data collected in the longitudinal study “National Study of the Determinants of the Increase of Smoking in Young Portuguese Women”, from the National Institute of Preventive Cardiology, using structural equation modeling.
We will adapt and validate implicit measures of smoking behavior used in some of the paradigms in the literature, such as: 1) the Implicit Association Test (IAT) used by De Houwer, Custers and De Clercq (2006) to measure attitudes related to tobacco use; 2) the Go/NoGo tasks (e.g. Luijten, Little & Franken, 2001), or 3) the method used by Germeroth, Wray and Tiffany (2014), in which response time to craving items was used as a measure of implicit processes related to the desire to smoke in dependent and non-dependent smokers.
We will ask participants to nominate groups who they think are tolerant and intolerant about smoking, and then we can adapt to the group level the priming paradigms. We will go from the paradigms used by Smith et al. (2004, supraliminal priming of social relationships) and Carlisle et al. (2012, subliminal priming of interpersonal relationships that vary in quality). The task that will be developed in E-Prime is based on the one used in Portugal by Marques et al. (2014) with the priming of different age groups.
We will adapt the paradigm developed by Carlisle et al. (2012), where the impact of stress on physiological responses is moderated by the activation of interpersonal relationships, to defend the thesis that the impact of stress on implicit measures of smoking behavior will be moderated by the activation of norms from groups with whom the participants identify themselves.
Results: None yet.
Publications: None yet.