NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Youth who watch a lot of movies with
cigarette-smoking characters - whether the films are rated R or PG-13 -
are more likely to start smoking themselves, researchers suggest in a
new study out Monday.
The report's lead author said the finding supports the idea that it's
the smoking itself - and not the sex, profanity or violence that may go
along with it in certain films - that influences youth to take up the
habit.
"Movie smoking seems to be just as impactful if it's packaged in a
PG-13 movie as opposed to an R movie," said Dr. James Sargent, from the
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"I really think it's a 'cool' factor. The more they see it, the more
they start to see ways that (smoking) might make them seem more
movie-star," he told Reuters Health - even if the effect is
subconscious.
Sargent and his colleagues counted how many times a character was
seen smoking in each of over 500 box-office hits from recent years.
Then, they asked 6,500 U.S. kids ages 10 to 14 which of a random
selection of 50 of those movies they'd watched.
The average "dose" of movie smoking was 275 scenes from films rated
PG-13 and 93 scenes from R movies, the researchers reported in
Pediatrics.
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