IMAGES ON THE DANGERS OF SMOKING AND ITS EFFECTIVENESS ON SMOKERS Essay

IMAGES ON THE DANGERS OF SMOKING AND ITS EFFECTIVENESS ON SMOKERS - Essay Example The recent attempt of the UK government in providing graphic warning images on cigarette packets are commendable in this respect. The success rate of this attempt in bringing down the addiction level remains a matter of speculation, for both theoretical analysis and empirical facts vary on the efficacy of such methods. Health psychologists believe that addiction is a behavioural disorder and proper health aware ness along with behavioural treatment (Baban & Craciun, 2007) among people might be instrumental in dealing with such addictive behaviour. Addiction to smoking is considered to be health-risk behaviour and calls for intervention. Effective intervention strategy and its implementation on the part of the government establishment are most helpful and fruitful in such cases of public awareness. The style and nature of intervention actually makes the difference in the success rate of goal achievement. Therefore it is imperative that the organisation, government or otherwise adopts the intervention device that could motivate and help the individual addict to get over the addiction permanently. Intervention is generally made by means of a number of intervention models namely the motivation model, behavioural enactment model and the multi-stage model (Baban & Craciun, 2007). What becomes most important is the connection between intervention based behaviour change and improvement in the general perception of a healthy life as pointed out by Abraham and Michie (2008). This particular effort on the part of the government to creat e better awareness by highlighting on the adverse effects of smoking could be termed as motivational intervention. In this case the objective of the intervention by means of some kind of a threat to one’s happiness is to induce a behaviour change and also by so doing motivating one to give it up. The health belief model which is a form of motivational model