Despite extensive tobacco control efforts, about one quarter of Americans continue to smoke, and tobacco use is estimated to be responsible for over 1000 deaths every day. Most smokers report being motivated to quit, yet most quit attempts end in failure, even when state of the art smoking cessation interventions are used. Surprisingly, it has remained unclear what bio-behavioral mechanisms underlie tobacco dependence. Traditionally, drug dependence has been thought to be underpinned by the acute hedonic effects of drugs (""""""""Liking"""""""" processes), together with the aversive effects of drug withdrawal. Recently, however, Robinson and Berridge (1993) have proposed that drug-induced sensitization of the neural circuitry subserving motivational processes (""""""""Wanting"""""""" processes) underlies the compulsive component of drug dependence; in effect, the motivational system of the brain is """"""""hijacked"""""""" by drug-taking. This proposal seeks to continue my research attempting to measure the extent of this corruption, using tasks originally developed within human experimental psychology, and to relate these potential measures of Wanting to tobacco dependence. In the proposed study, smokers will complete a battery of wanting and Liking measures. Most importantly, smokers will perform two computerized tasks - the emotional stroop task and the dot-probe task - which assess the degree to which a smoker's attention is grabbed by smoking-related cues. These """"""""attentional bias"""""""" tasks may provide an indirect measure of the motivational salience of drug related cues and could be useful tools to assess motivational processes. Self reported urge to smoke will be measured and a behavioral choice task will be administered. Liking measures will be derived from subjective responses to smoking a cigarette. Each participant will be tested twice, once when overnight deprived, and once when minimally deprived.
My aims are to i) examine the relationship between the attentional bias measures and dependence, ii) assess the coherence of the various Wanting measures, and iii) determine the separability between Wanting measures and measures of Liking. In doing so, we can evaluate the relative importance of these measures to tobacco dependence. The overall goal of this study is to better understand the critical processes underlying tobacco dependence, and, more specifically, to evaluate the relevance of attentional bias to tobacco dependence. If attentional bias is an important component of dependence, then interventions which reduce it may be effective in smoking cessation. Thus, attentional bias tasks could be used to evaluate the utility of potential smoking cessation interventions.
| Waters, Andrew J; Carter, Brian L; Robinson, Jason D et al. (2009) Attentional bias is associated with incentive-related physiological and subjective measures. Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 17:247-57 |
| Waters, Andrew J; Carter, Brian L; Robinson, Jason D et al. (2007) Implicit attitudes to smoking are associated with craving and dependence. Drug Alcohol Depend 91:178-86 |
| Waters, Andrew J; Parrott, W Gerrod; Mogg, Karin et al. (2007) Processing bias for terror-related stimuli and September 11th-related distress in college students. Psychol Rep 101:787-95 |
