Evidence suggests that smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of suffering from heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, high blood pressure, and premature aging. The smoker is also at risk of many short-term health consequences such as chronic cough, yellow teeth, and unpleasant breath. Smoking is an expensive habit that can cost up to 1500 dollars per year if the individual smokes a pack per day. Tobacco industries direct 90% of recommendation their cigarette advertisements toward today's youth, hoping to hook another young adolescent into their money making scheme. Onset of smoking in children occurs at an early age due to a number of factors that include pro-social smoking advertisements, peer, and even antismoking campaigns such as DARE. Primary prevention techniques that attempt to stop the behavior before it starts are effective because children are still young enough to be molded and influenced accordingly by the proper role-models (i.e. peers and parents).

Preventative measures, such as informational campaigns are ineffective because they are unrealistic and fail to emphasize on the "here and now." These measures focus on the future h

should be influential in later decisions to smoke. We plan to use a hypocrisy manipulation but modify it by providing the adolescent participants with specific guidelines for their videotaped messages.

Participants were 186 eighth grade students from nine different health classes at Stafford Middle School. All students were required to obtain a signed parental consent form (see appendix A) in order participate in our study. As an incentive for maximum participation, each health class was informed that if 95% of the consent form were returned, the students would be entitle to a free pizza party. Ninety-two boys and 63 girls completed and returned their consent forms giving a total of 155 participants.

The question to be address is what can be done to motivate healthy behavior. Hypocrisy manipulations have been used in the past to decrease the frequency of unwanted behaviors. Hypocrisy manipulations promote behavior change because they motivate a person to think about their inconsistencies.

During each health class, participants with signed consent forms were administered a baseline survey (see appendix B) by the school psychologist, Steven Crain. The baseline measure asked questions such as age, sex, smoking behavior (I have never smoked a cigarette to I have smoked a pack or more in the last week), significant others who smoke (i.e. mother, father, brothers, sisters, etc.), perception of peers' prevalence of and adults smoking( 0-100%), and two distracter items-bicycle helmet use and exercise habits.

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Approximate Word count = 1093
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)