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Pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs can help discourage more people from picking up the habit, a public health expert said on Tuesday, citing the results of a recently released study.

Rita Damayanti, a researcher from the University of Indonesia’s School of Public Health, said they found that smokers, when asked to pick from three different pictures depicting the dangers of smoking, tended not to pick the one showing the gory details of smoking’s effects.

“Such a picture on the package of cigarettes may help discourage smoking,” she said. “When we showed [respondents] some pictures, only 34 percent of smokers chose the awful picture of a person suffering from tobacco-related ailments such as cancer, while 41 percent of the nonsmokers chose it.”

The study showed the pictures to 1,239 respondents from Jakarta and Cirebon.

Rita said that 44 percent of the smokers questioned opted for more symbolic pictures, such as one depicting a couple in discord, symbolizing impotency. The same picture was picked by only 36 percent of those who did not smoke.

She added that 32 percent of the smokers involved in the study chose the third picture, that of a man under treatment at a hospital.

“The fact that smokers tend to choose symbolic pictures rather than the gory pictures show that they are afraid of cigarette-related ailments,” she said.