Onscreen smoking influences teens

Movie characters who smoke do influence teens to follow their example.

Washington, July 02: Movie characters who smoke while playing good or bad guys do influence teens to follow their example, says the latest research.

"Previous studies have confirmed a link between smoking in movies and the initiation of smoking by adolescents, and we wanted to dig deeper into the data to see if the type of character who is smoking matters," said Susanne Tanski, study co-author and professor at Dartmouth Medical School. "It`s true that `bad guys` are more often smokers in the movies, but there really are not that many `bad guys` compared to `good guys`. "Episode for episode, youth who saw negative characters smoking were more likely to start smoking, but since overall there is so much more exposure to `good guy` smoking, the net effect is similar," Tanski explained. The survey also revealed that low-risk teens, based on sensation-seeking behaviour, are more strongly influenced by "bad guy" movie smoking. "This suggests that it`s alluring for `good` kids to emulate the `bad` characters on the movie screen," said Tanksi. She acknowledges that, although there is a downward trend, smoking still occurs in many movies that teens watch, particularly given the popularity of movie channels and video rentals providing access to older films. The study was published in the July 2009 issue of Paediatrics. IANS