Psychology On Smoking Essay, Research Paper

Do Cigarettes Calm People Down?

Many people say that a cigarette will calm them down, but is that the case, or is it the nicotine in a cigarette limits the ability of the human brain to focus on more than one thing at a time. In Jon D. Kassel s study of the affects of nicotine, he tried to prove that nicotine doesn t make the problem go away, it just temporally distracts attention from the problem giving the person a false sense of calmness. A two-part hypothesis was developed by Jon D. Kassel and Marina Unrod based on the previous findings of Kassel and Shiffman. Part one of this hypothesis stated that those who exhibit higher levels of anxiety may show a stronger response to a combination of nicotine and distraction. Part two stated that, on the contrary, those who exhibit higher levels of anxiety may be less apt to respond and more resistant to the combination of nicotine and distracting influences.

In Kassel s study, he used the cognitive perspective by playing on the role on the mental processes of his subjects. Kassel used William James idea of functionalism in his experiment. Functionalism is the study of the purpose, or function, of behavior or mental experiences. This falls under the category of functionalism because the study itself relies on both behavior of the individual and the mental experiences that they manipulated through the study. The cognitive perspective is demonstrated in this experiment by the fact that Kassel focused on the manner in which mental processes are redirected by a given set of circumstances. The circumstances in this experiment were that smokers could redirect their attention away from an anxiety-causing problem with the use of nicotine provided in cigarettes.

In Kassel s experiment he asked sixty-seven participants to prepare and read an embarrassing speech about themselves. The subjects in his experiment were all constant smokers for at least two years. The subjects were assigned a small cubical. Following stress-inducing activities, subjects were allowed to smoke with some exposed to visual distractions and others were not. Some subjects smoked cigarettes with high levels of nicotine while others were given cigarettes with reduced nicotine levels. Levels of anxiety in the subjects were recorded and evaluated according to the amount of change as a result of the experimental factors. The results of this experiment were identical to the results of the first experiment. The subjects that smoked cigarettes with more nicotine were distracted more than the subjects that smoked a cigarette with a low amount of nicotine, thus proving that nicotine is the primary substance that affects the degree of distraction of the subjects.

The conclusion of this experiment showed that people who smoked cigarettes were not actually calmer after a cigarette, just blinded from the truth. The truth being that nicotine in cigarettes causes the human mind to lose its focus on a broad amount of things, falsely giving a feeling of calmness.