14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out at Staffordshire University, has concluded that women who see the effects that smoking will have on their faces, might be shocked enough to quit.
This research has been funded by Stoke-on-Trent NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT), and it involved 47 women aged between 18 and 34 years.
The researchers used the latest morphing technology to create images of how smokers will age if they keep smoking and how will they look like if they stop.
Professor Sarah Grogan, Project Lead and Professor of Health Psychology, said that the method was so successful that more than two thirds of the participants said that they will quit smoking because of what they have seen.
She explained that “using state-of-the-art age progression software we have been able to take a picture of women's faces and show them how they will age if they smoked and if they stopped.
"We found that women were very concerned about the impact of aging on their faces in general and in particular the additional impact of smoking on their skin.
"Many experienced a physical shock reaction, including reports of nausea, to seeing how they would age if they continued to smoke.
"And they reported being highly motivated to quit smoking as a result of the intervention and many said that they would take active steps to quit having seen how they would look if they continued to smoke."
Even if this experiment had such a big impact, the researchers plan to retest the participants six months later, to see to what extent they have managed to stop smoking.
They do, however, hope that this technology will be a success, so that it can be used more widely, AlphaGalileo reports.
“This is the first research investigating age-progression morphing software in this country, and we're hoping that eventually the findings can be implemented in stop smoking services across the UK, said Professor Grogan.
The Professor worked with Keira Flett, Research Assistant, and Professor David Clark-Carter, both from Staffordshire University.
The paper presenting the research is entitled 'Women Smokers' Experiences of an Age-appearance Anti-smoking Intervention: A Qualitative Study', and has been published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, published by BPS Journals in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell.