Opportunistic smoking cessation interventions for people accessing financial support settings: A scoping review.

AIM: The aim of this work was to systematically scope the evidence on opportunistic tobacco smoking cessation interventions for people accessing financial support settings. METHODS: We searched MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group specialized register to 21 March 2023. We duplicate screened 20% of titles/abstracts and all full texts. We included primary studies investigating smoking cessation interventions delivered opportunistically to people who smoked tobacco, within settings offering support for problems caused by financial hardship, for example homeless support services, social housing and food banks. Data were charted by one reviewer, checked by another and narratively synthesized. RESULTS: We included 25 studies conducted in a range of financial support settings using qualitative (e.g. interviews and focus groups) and quantitative (e.g. randomized controlled trials, surveys and single arm intervention studies) methodologies. Evidence on the acceptability and feasibility of opportunistic smoking cessation advice was investigated among both clients and providers. Approximately 90% of service providers supported such interventions; however, lack of resources, staff training and a belief that tobacco smoking reduced illicit substance use were perceived barriers. Clients welcomed being asked about smoking and offered assistance to quit and expressed interest in interventions including the provision of nicotine replacement therapy, e-cigarettes and incentives to quit smoking. Six studies investigated the comparative effectiveness of opportunistic smoking cessation interventions on quitting success, with five comparing more to less intensive interventions, with mixed results. CONCLUSIONS: Most studies investigating opportunistic smoking cessation interventions in financial support settings have not measured their effectiveness. Where they have, settings, populations, interventions and findings have varied. There is more evidence investigating acceptability, with promising results.

Food Is All Around: How Contexts Create Misbeliefs About the Health-Taste Relationship.

We investigated a novel cognitive-ecological account for misbeliefs about the relationship between food healthiness and tastiness. We propose that different frequencies of healthy and tasty foods in contrasting contexts can trigger perceptions that health and taste are related in ways that diverge from the actual health-taste correlation in the presented food. To investigate this proposal, we conducted three studies (total N = 369), including a taste test, with adult Prolific academic participants from the United Kingdom and undergraduate psychology students from Austria. Our results showed that different frequencies of healthy and tasty food across contrasting contexts can trigger misbeliefs about the relationship between health and taste. These findings demonstrate that properties of the food ecology combined with basic cognitive processes can help explain the formation of beliefs about food such as that unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food. Our study extends the existing explanations for food beliefs and provides a perspective on how they can be changed.

How Often Do You Think About Your Relationship With Nature? The Measurement of Environmental Identity Salience and Its Relationship With Proenvironmental Behaviors.

Extant research finds that environmental identity is an important motivational factor for proenvironmental behavior. However, studies typically focus on investigating the effects of the strength of this identity. Based on insights from identity research, we theorize that the influence of individuals' environmental identity on their proenvironmental behavior may depend on other identity dimensions as well. We argue that the frequency of activation of environmental identity in relevant life domains-environmental identity salience-may predict proenvironmental behavior beyond what environmental identity strength can explain. To test our theorizing, we propose a parsimonious measure of environmental identity salience. In four empirical studies, we establish that the new measure has sound psychometric properties in terms of internal consistency and discriminant validity with regard to measures of environmental identity strength. Importantly, our measure of environmental identity salience reliably predicts a range of self-reported and actual proenvironmental behaviors beyond the effects of environmental identity strength. In line with theoretical predictions, our data suggests that environmental identity salience and strength are related but distinct constructs. We conclude that investigating the nature and effects of environmental identity salience leads to a fruitful path to a more comprehensive understanding of proenvironmental behavior. The proposed new measure may serve as a helpful tool in this endeavor.

Connectedness With Nature and Individual Responses to a Pandemic: An Exploratory Study.

Most recent epidemics have originated in complex human-nature interactions and yet, our knowledge is very limited regarding the psychological aspects of human-nature relationships that underlie individual human responses in times of pandemic crises. We propose that the concept of connectedness with nature and associated individual difference measures offer a relevant and useful lens to inform us about how humans think, feel and behave in such critical times. Our two-wave study, conducted with 486 United States residents at the end of March 2020 (wave 1) and 533 United States residents at the beginning of May 2020 (wave 2), focuses on the 2020 coronavirus situation. It maps individual responses to the current pandemic in terms of mental representations, behavioral tendencies and perceived impact, and explores the relationships of these constructs to individual levels of connectedness with nature. As this research employs an exploratory methodology, our results provide an account of potential relationships rather than their validation and thus represent an encouraging steppingstone for research on human behavior in the time of a global pandemic. We identify a series of research propositions and questions for systematic future inquiry.

Beyond Healthiness: The Impact of Traffic Light Labels on Taste Expectations and Purchase Intentions.

The aim of traffic light labels on food products is to help consumers assess their healthiness. However, it is not clear whether traffic light labels do not have undesired side effects by signaling lower tastiness of healthy product alternatives and reducing purchase intentions. We therefore conducted a study with consumers from Austria (N = 173) in which we presented the amount of sugar contained in products on labels with or without traffic light colors based on the coding criteria of the UK Food Standards Agency. Expectations of products' healthiness and tastiness, as well as purchase intentions were assessed. The products were randomly sampled from the category of desserts from a supermarket. The declared amount of sugar was experimentally varied. The traffic light labels helped participants differentiate between the healthiness of products with different sugar levels. They did not affect the expected tastiness of the healthier alternatives. Moreover, participants did not report lower purchase intentions for products high in sugar, but a higher purchase intention for products low in sugar when traffic light colors were used compared to when they were not used.

Sugar labeling: How numerical information of sugar content influences healthiness and tastiness expectations.

Overconsumption of highly sugary foods contributes to increases in obesity and diabetes in our population, and initiatives are issued worldwide to reduce sugar content in food products. However, it is unclear how the presentation of reduced sugar content on food packages affects taste expectations of consumers. Based on the learned knowledge about negative health effects of sugar and the common belief that unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food, consumers might conclude that lower sugar levels are associated with higher healthiness and lower tastiness. Addressing this concern, we examined how quantitative information about sugar content without any verbal description influences consumers' health and taste expectations of dairy desserts. We asked participants to indicate the expected healthiness and tastiness of randomly sampled dairy desserts, while varying systematically the quantitative sugar information provided in a label presented with the desserts (numerical sugar level in grams per 100 grams of product: low vs. original vs. high). We assumed that quantitative sugar content is not equally associated with healthiness and tastiness of products and that numerical information about sugar content informs health more than taste expectations. Therefore, we predicted that consumers expect higher healthiness, but not to the same degree lower tastiness for products with reduced sugar contented compared to products with higher sugar content. The results of the present study are in line with this hypothesis. We found that consumers expected desserts with less sugar to be healthier than desserts with higher levels of sugar. The experimentally varied sugar levels did not affect the tastiness expectations. Notably, consumers did not follow the unhealthy = tasty intuition and did not devaluate the tastiness of desserts because of heightened healthiness expectations. Our findings suggest that sole numerical information about sugar content-an important nutritional value-is more diagnostic in the construction of healthiness rather than tastiness expectations of food products.

Advertising models in the act of eating: How the depiction of different eating phases affects consumption desire and behavior.

In print advertising, the use of static pictures depicting models eating food is common practice. However, less is known about how the depiction of models in different phases of consumption (holding food, moving food to mouth, taking a bite, chewing on food) affects consumers. Theories have proposed that not only do individuals mimic actions, but they also adopt the goals and the motivational patterns underlying these actions by observing others. Building on this view, we hypothesized that consumers' desire to eat a food product and their actual consumption of a food product would be greater when the model in the picture was close to engaging in consumption and that desire and actual consumption would be reduced when the model was shown in the process of finishing consumption. In two studies, we found that the participants experienced an increased desire to eat the depicted food (Study 1) and ate more of the advertised food (Study 2) when the model was shown to engage in eating food compared with when the model was shown during completion of a consumption episode. In addition, the results of Study 1 suggest that even subtle differences such as holding food compared with putting food into the mouth might affect consumers' desire to eat. Overall, our results suggest that advertisements may affect consumers' motivation to engage in food intake differently depending on which consumption state they show with the depiction of a model close to engagement in food consumption being most likely to trigger a desire for consumption and an actual engagement in food intake.

Playing with food: The effects of food pre-exposure on consumption in young children.

Recent research has shown that pre-exposure to food can lead to reduced subsequent consumption in older children and adults when they focus on a task with a non-eating goal during exposure. One assumption is that the reduced consumption is a consequence of self-regulation that helps to concentrate on the task. Because self-regulatory mechanisms are still under development in young children, we studied the effects of food pre-exposure in young children under the age of six (N = 81). Children played a memory game with real sweets (food pre-exposure) or similar non-food stimuli (non-food pre-exposure) and we measured their subsequent food consumption. In contrast to the findings with older children in other studies, we found that pre-exposure led to an increase (not a decrease) in subsequent consumption. This effect was stronger among children with a higher BMI. Food exposure paradigms might not lead to the desired reduction in food intake in young children, whose BMI is positively associated with food reactivity. Thus, food exposure must continue to be considered a strong risk factor for obesity in young children.

Effects of Imagined Consumption and Simulated Eating Movements on Food Intake: Thoughts about Food Are Not Always of Advantage.

Imagined food consumption is a method of elaborately imagining oneself eating a specific food that, when repeated 30 times, has been shown to decrease subsequent intake of the same food. The technique relies on a memory-based habituation process when behavioral and motivational responses to a stimulus decrease after its repeated presentation. Thus, repeatedly imagining food consumption leads to food-specific habituation effects. Large numbers of imagined consumption repetitions are effortful and time consuming and can be problematic when applied in interventions with the goal of reducing food intake. In the present study, we assessed the efficacy of the technique at smaller numbers of repetitions while testing motor simulation as a potential facilitator of the habituation-based consumption-reduction effect. 147 participants imagined eating chocolate pudding 15 or 3 consecutive times and simultaneously performed either facilitating or not-facilitating eating movements. Results showed that participants who imagined eating the chocolate pudding 15 times (M15 = 178.20, SD15 = 68.08) ate more of the pudding than those who imagined consuming it 3 times (M3 = 150.73, SD3 = 73.31). The nature of the motor movements that were performed did not impact this effect. The data suggest that the imagined food consumption technique can result in an unexpected increase in food consumption, when smaller numbers of imagination repetitions are performed.