Situation and Personality Effects on Smokers’ Psychological Reactance

This paper tries to investigate the situational and personal aspects that may trigger smokers’ psychological state reactance. It was hypothesized that situational factors, such as perceived threat to freedom and perceived loss of control which are supposed to be triggered by an anti-smoking persuasive message, and a personality pattern, such as trait reactance proneness, predict the psychological state reactance. An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 352 smoking students in two Tunisian business schools. Four anti-smoking print ads, with two different levels of negative emotional intensity, were manipulated. The findings depict the importance of the anti-smoking ads with a high negative emotional intensity, the perceived threat to freedom and trait reactance proneness in the smokers’ psychological reactance prediction.