Emotion regulation in heavy smokers: experiential, expressive and physiological consequences of cognitive reappraisal.

Lingdan Wu,Matthias J Wieser,Markus H Winkler,Paul Pauli,Yonghui Li,Marta Andreatta

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01555

Abstract

Emotion regulation dysfunctions are assumed to contribute to the development of tobacco addiction and relapses among smokers attempting to quit. To further examine this hypothesis, the present study compared heavy smokers with non-smokers (NS) in a reappraisal task. Specifically, we investigated whether non-deprived smokers (NDS) and deprived smokers (DS) differ from non-smokers in cognitive emotion regulation and whether there is an association between the outcome of emotion regulation and the cigarette craving. Sixty-five participants (23 non-smokers, 22 NDS, and 20 DS) were instructed to down-regulate emotions by reappraising negative or positive pictorial scenarios. Self-ratings of valence, arousal, and cigarette craving as well as facial electromyography and electroencephalograph activities were measured. Ratings, facial electromyography, and electroencephalograph data indicated that both NDS and DS performed comparably to nonsmokers in regulating emotional responses via reappraisal, irrespective of the valence of pictorial stimuli. Interestingly, changes in cigarette craving were positively associated with regulation of emotional arousal irrespective of emotional valence. These results suggest that heavy smokers are capable to regulate emotion via deliberate reappraisal and smokers’ cigarette craving is associated with emotional arousal rather than emotional valence. This study provides preliminary support for the therapeutic use of reappraisal to replace maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies in nicotine addicts.

Highlights

Nicotine addiction is the most prevalent type of drug addiction, and one of the leading causes of preventable diseases (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011a; World Health Organization, 2011, 2013)
The one way ANOVAs revealed that non-smokers, deprived smokers (DS) and non-deprived smokers (NDS) did not differ in age, sex ratio, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) score, State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)-trait and STAI-states scores
This study aimed to investigate whether general emotion regulation competence via reappraisal is deteriorated in nicotine addicts

Summary

Introduction

Nicotine addiction is the most prevalent type of drug addiction, and one of the leading causes of preventable diseases (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011a; World Health Organization, 2011, 2013). Smoking is estimated to kill approximately 6 million people per year with an additional 600000 assumed to be dying from the effects of second-hand smoke (Mathers and Loncar, 2006; Oberg et al, 2011). This sum surpasses even the estimated amount of people killed by HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined (World Health Organization, 2012). The relapse rates were reported as high as 75–95% after successful intervention for smoking cessation within 6– 12 months (Garvey et al, 1992; Ferguson et al, 2005; Nakajima and Al’absi, 2012)

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