Craving has been related to the maintenance of smoking and has been identified as directly responsible for the high rate of relapse encountered frequently in treatments for cigarette smokers. Three studies will be conducted to aid in the further development of laboratory-based procedures for the manipulation and assessment of craving related variables. These studies will provide information on the use of two new measures of reactivity to smoking stimuli, probe reaction time and probe startle reflex, to elucidate the affective and cognitive substrates of craving processes. This research will also evaluate different imagery-based manipulations of drug-relevant stimuli. Study 1 will examine the impact of smoking deprivation and imagery-induced craving on reaction time, an index of cognitive functioning. This study will use a brief imagery procedure in which subjects imagine sentences that depict craving or are craving neutral. The data will evaluate the hypothesis that craving reflects the operation of effortful cognitive processes and will determine if smoking deprivation selectively disrupts probe reaction-time during craving induction. Study 2 will use the brief imagery procedure to determine the effect of imagery-induced craving, imagery-induced affect and smoking deprivation on the auditory-probe startle reflex. Previous research has shown that startle is enhanced by affective manipulations and during craving imagery. This study will replicate effects of affect on startle and evaluate whether smoking deprivation produces generalized and/or stimulus-specific changes in startle responding. Study 3 will use a longer imagery procedure to compare verbal and physiological manifestations of craving elicited by standard or personal imagery scripts. This study will establish procedures for the systematic development of personally relevant craving-eliciting material and determine whether personal scripts elicit markedly greater craving reactivity than standard scripts.
| Bailey, Steffani R; Goedeker, Katherine C; Tiffany, Stephen T (2010) The impact of cigarette deprivation and cigarette availability on cue-reactivity in smokers. Addiction 105:364-72 |
| Carter, B L; Tiffany, S T (2001) The cue-availability paradigm: the effects of cigarette availability on cue reactivity in smokers. Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 9:183-90 |
| Tiffany, S T; Cox, L S; Elash, C A (2000) Effects of transdermal nicotine patches on abstinence-induced and cue-elicited craving in cigarette smokers. J Consult Clin Psychol 68:233-40 |
