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Record W4410225433 · doi:10.2196/59515

Perceptions Toward an Attentional Bias Modification Mobile Game Among Individuals With Low Socioeconomic Status Who Smoke: Qualitative Study

2025· article· en· W4410225433 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Michael Wakeman, Lydia Tesfaye, Gunnar Baskin, T. Ryan Gregory, Greg Gruse, Erin Leahy, Brandon Kendrick, Sherine El‐Toukhy

Bibliographic record

VenueJMIR Serious Games · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicSmoking Behavior and Cessation
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Institutes of Health
KeywordsPsychologyExpectancy theorySmoking cessationApplied psychologyFocus groupPerceptionSocioeconomic statusSocial psychologyMedicineEnvironmental healthPopulation

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background: Attentional bias modification (ABM) can help address implicit attention from individuals who smoke toward smoking cues, which trigger cravings and lapses that impede smoking cessation. We developed an ABM mobile game, Fruit Squish, to support individuals who smoke and are quitting as part of a multicomponent smoking cessation mobile app, Quit Journey. Users advance in the game by tapping on neutral (ie, fruit) rather than smoking-related (eg, cigarette pack) imagery that they are presented with, essentially training them to avoid focusing on smoking cues. Objective: This study aimed to gauge acceptance of an ABM smoking cues mobile game among young adults who smoked and were socioeconomically disadvantaged. Methods: We recruited 38 individuals who smoked cigarettes, aged 18-29 years, who were neither 4-year college graduates nor enrollees in 4-year colleges to participate in 12 semistructured digital focus groups. Sessions were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. We used ATLAS.ti software to code the transcripts for salient themes based on the Second Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology constructs (ie, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, performance expectancy, and social influence) and sentiment (ie, negative, neutral, and positive). Results: Performance expectancy of the mobile game was the dominant technology acceptance construct discussed (34/110, 30.90%). Perceived usefulness of the game was mixed in sentiment owing to perceptions that the game aimed to distract individuals who smoke during cravings and concerns that cue imagery in the game could trigger cravings. Hedonic motivation was the second most discussed technology acceptance construct (17/110, 15.45%), with participants describing the game as neither fun nor engaging. Participants referenced their past experiences with mobile games and mobile device characteristics as facilitating conditions for using the game (10/110, 9.09%). Although effort expectancy was minimally discussed (6/110, 5.45%), the game was characterized as easy to use. To improve the game, participants suggested adding new levels with increasing difficulty (eg, increase stimuli speed and limit session time) and new game elements (eg, leaderboard). Other suggestions included improving game graphics and renaming the game to capture its relation to smoking cessation. Conclusions: Young adults with low socioeconomic status who smoke had mixed reactions to a mobile smoking cues ABM game. Results suggest the need to communicate the rationale underlying ABM games to users and their potential positive effects on smoking cessation. To promote the uptake and sustained use of ABM mobile games, they need to be on par with commercially available entertainment mobile apps. Research is needed to explore the efficacy of gamified ABM on cognitive biases in real-life settings.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.053
Threshold uncertainty score0.813

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.392
Teacher spread0.349 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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