The motivational salience of cigarette-related stimuli among former, never, and current smokers. Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 2015 Feb;23(1):37-48
Date
12/02/2014Pubmed ID
25436840Pubmed Central ID
PMC4314387DOI
10.1037/a0038467Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84925670296 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 20 CitationsAbstract
While smokers are known to find smoking-related stimuli motivationally salient, the extent to which former smokers do so is largely unknown. In this study, we collected event-related potential (ERP) data from former and never smokers and compared them to a sample of current smokers interested in quitting who completed the same ERP paradigm prior to smoking cessation treatment. All participants (n = 180) attended 1 laboratory session where we recorded dense-array ERPs in response to cigarette-related, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures and where we collected valence and arousal ratings of the pictures. We identified 3 spatial and temporal regions of interest, corresponding to the P1 (120-132 ms), early posterior negativity (EPN; 244-316 ms), and late positive potential (LPP; 384-800 ms) ERP components. We found that all participants produced larger P1 responses to cigarette-related pictures compared to the other picture categories. With the EPN component, we found that, similar to pleasant and unpleasant pictures, cigarette-related pictures attracted early attentional resources, regardless of smoking status. Both former and never smokers produced reduced LPP responses to cigarette-related and pleasant pictures compared to current smokers. Current smokers rated the cigarette-related pictures as being more pleasant and arousing than the former and never smokers. The LPP and picture-rating results suggest that former smokers, like never smokers, do not find cigarette-related stimuli to be as motivationally salient as current smokers.
Author List
Robinson JD, Versace F, Engelmann JM, Cui Y, Slapin A, Oum R, Cinciripini PMMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AdolescentAdult
Aged
Humans
Middle Aged
Motivation
Smoking
Young Adult