Verbal and physiological manifestations of smoking urges produced through imagery: The role of affect and smoking abstinence

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of affect and abstinence on urges/cravings to smoke produced in an imagery paradigm. One hundred cigarette smokers were asked to vividly imagine imagery scripts that described positive affect and explicit smoking urges, positive affect alone, negative affect and explicit smoking urges, negative affect alone, neutral affect and explicit smoking urges, and neutral affect alone. Each subject participated in two sessions, scheduled six or twenty-four hours apart, and one-half of the subjects were asked to refrain from smoking over their intersession interval. The results indicated that the imagery manipulation clearly produced content-specific effects in physiological responses and verbal reports of smoking urges. Imagery scripts that contained explicit descriptions of urges elicited significantly stronger urge/craving reports than scripts devoid of urge content. Among scripts without explicit urge descriptors, negative affect scripts produced significantly stronger urge/craving reports than either the positive affect scripts or the neutral affect scripts. Among scripts with explicit urge descriptors, the inclusion of positive or negative affect content resulted in higher levels of urge/craving report than that produced by neutral affect scripts combined with urge descriptors. This suggests that affect contributed to urge elicitation even when the imagery scripts contained explicit urge material. Scripts that elicited the strongest verbal reports of urges/cravings also produced significantly higher levels of heart rate responding than did the scripts that were less effective at eliciting verbal reports of urges. Abstinence did not appear to have an impact on physiological responding, but abstinent subjects reported significantly stronger urges/cravings to all of the imagery scripts than did the subjects who continued to smoke over the intersession interval. The implications of these results for contemporary models of drug urges are discussed