title: The motivational salience of cigarette-related stimuli among former, never, and current smokers.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Jason D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Robinson
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Versace
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Jeffery M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Engelmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Aurelija
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Slapin
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Oum
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science.
authors.forename: Paul M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Cinciripini
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D012907:Smoking / Q000523:psychology*; D014026:Nicotiana; D055815:Young Adult