EVENT, DISEASES
Perceived severity: beliefs about the negative consequences of the health threat.Perceived vulnerability: vulnerability to the negative consequences of the threatened event.Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards: the benefits of the performance of the maladaptive behaviour.Self-efficacy: confidence in one’s ability to perform the preventive behaviour.Response efficacy: beliefs about the effectiveness of the preventive behaviour for the threatened event.Response cost: barriers to performance of the preventive behaviour.For smokers who remained abstinent, messages were only based on protection motivation theory. The protection motivation theory has seven components (sub-constructs) which we applied to study the psychological determinants of participants’ smoking behaviour: perceived severity of smoking-related diseases; perceived vulnerability to smoking-related diseases; intrinsic rewards of smoking; extrinsic rewards of smoking; self-efficacy of quitting; response efficacy of quitting; and response cost of quitting.