How emotion science could help solve the leading cause of preventable death

The World Health Organization says smoking is the leading cause of global preventable death, killing up to 8 million people prematurely every year—far more than die in wars and conflicts. Yet the emotions evoked by national and international anti-smoking campaigns and the impact of those emotions has never been fully studied until now. HKS Professor Jennifer Lerner, a decision scientist who studies emotion, and Vaughan Rees, the director for the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, say their research involving actual smokers in the lab shows that sadness—the emotion most often evoked in anti-smoking ads—can actually induce people to smoke more. Lerner and Rees’ research also found that evoking gratitude, an emotion that appears to function in nearly the exact opposite manner to sadness, made people want to smoke less and made them more likely to join a smoking-cessation program. Lerner and Rees join host Ralph Ranalli on the latest episode of the HKS PolicyCast to discuss their research and to offer research-backed policy recommendations—including closer collaboration between researchers who study emotion science, which is also known as affective science, and agencies like the Centers for Disease Control.

Policy Recommendations:

Jennifer Lerner’s Policy Recommendations:

• Promote active collaboration between researchers and public health agencies (e.g., CDC, FDA) to develop health communications that leverage the most current, research-backed findings from affective and decision science.
• Rigorously assess not only the benefits of public service announcements but also potential harms.  Assessments often overlook the emotional distress these messages can cause, despite the potential of distress to undermine desired outcomes.

Vaughan Rees’ Policy Recommendations:

• Expand research into integrating emotion-based strategies, such as gratitude exercises, into school-based prevention programs for adolescents to reduce the risk of tobacco and other substance use, as well as risky sexual behaviors.
• Introduce research-backed, emotion-based components in cessation counseling and support systems, helping individuals better manage high-risk situations and maintain abstinence after quitting.

Dr. Jennifer Lerner is the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, Management and Decision Science at the Harvard Kennedy School.She is the first psychologist in the history of the Harvard Kennedy School to receive tenure.  Lerner, who also holds appointments in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, conducts research that draws insights from psychology, economics, and neuroscience and aims to improve decision making in high-stakes contexts. Together with colleagues, Lerner developed a theoretical framework that successfully predicts the effects of specific emotions on specific judgment and choice outcomes. Among other honors, Lerner received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to scientists and engineers in early stages of their careers. Lerner earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California–Berkeley and was awarded a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA. She joined the Harvard faculty and received tenure in 2007, and from 2018-2019 she took a temporary leave from Harvard to serve as the Chief Decision Scientist for the United States Navy.

Vaughan Rees is Director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The center’s mission is to reduce the global burden of tobacco-related death and disease through training, research, and the translation of science into public health policies and programs. Rees also dir