Scholar finds another link between sex and smoking

Men who want to quit smoking should refrain from viewing images of attractive women, according to a Focus Taiwan News Channel report quoting a study by a Taiwanese scholar.

The reason, apparently, is that viewing such images could put men in an immediate-gratification state of mind, leading to reduced self-control over their smoking.

The study, by Chiou Wen-bin, a professor of education at National Sun Yat-sen University, revealed that men who wanted to quit smoking or reduce their tobacco cravings should concentrate on curbing the immediate impulse to smoke.

Viewing pictures of attractive women could stimulate a mating mindset in men, leading them to display increased temporal discounting, which is associated with yielding to the immediately satisfiable impulse to smoke, Chiou said.

Chiou said he and his research team conducted experiments under laboratory conditions to examine whether viewing the faces of attractive women rendered male smokers with the intention to quit or reduce smoking more likely to give in to the immediate impulse to smoke.

Seventy-six men were randomly assigned to view either attractive or unattractive opposite-sex faces.

‘Participants who viewed attractive opposite-sex faces smoked more cigarettes than those who viewed less-attractive faces,” according to the results of the study.

This suggests that ‘thoughts of sex may be connected more closely with impulse-control behaviors such as smoking than previously thought’, the paper stated.