Emotion differentiation and intensity during acute tobacco abstinence: A comparison of heavy and light smokers

Abstract

The ability to recognize and label discrete emotions, termed emotion differentiation, is particularly pertinent to overall emotion regulation abilities. Patterns of deficient emotion differentiation have been associated with mood and anxiety disorders but have yet to be examined in relation to nicotine dependence. This study employed ecological momentary assessment to examine smokers’ subjective experience of discrete emotions during 24-h of forced tobacco abstinence. Thirty daily smokers rated their emotions up to 23 times over the 24-hour period, and smoking abstinence was biologically verified. From these data, we computed individual difference measures of emotion differentiation, overall emotion intensity, and emotional variability. As hypothesized, heavy smokers reported poorer negative emotion differentiation than light smokers (d = 0.55), along with more intense negative emotion (d = 0.97) and greater negative emotion variability (d = 0.97). No differences were observed in positive emotion differentiation. Across the sample, poorer negative emotion differentiation was associated with greater endorsement of psychological motives to smoke, including negative and positive reinforcement motives, while positive emotion differentiation was not.

Insula reactivity to negative stimuli is associated with daily cigarette use: A preliminary investigation using the Human Connectome Database

“…However, smokers may be vulnerable to misinterpreting the source of interoceptive changes associated with negative affect leading to nicotine use even when negative affect is not due to withdrawal. For instance, heavy smokers, relative to lighter smokers, are particularly poor at differentiating between various negative emotions and may use nicotine as an emotion regulation strategy (Sheets et al, 2015). The idea that negative affect, irrespective of origin, can influence smoking is suggested by the current work given that a relationship was found between daily cigarette use and insula reactivity to negative stimuli.…”

A contextual model of self-regulation change mechanisms among individuals with addictive disorders

“…Hence, the ability to accurately discriminate among various situational cues may be crucial in enabling an individual to select strategies that are most effective for the specific types of cues that are present. Indeed, there is preliminary evidence that the ability to discriminate emotional states is protective against problematic substance use (Emery, Simons, Clarke, & Gaher, 2014; Kashdan, Ferssizidis, Collins, & Muraven, 2010; Sheets, Bujarski, Leventhal, & Ray, 2015). …”

Time varying connectivity across the brain changes as a function of nicotine abstinence state

“…However, SUD is strongly associated with impairments in interoceptive processing [100][101][102][103] , including decreased activation to interoceptive cues in the OFC-a constituent node of the UNC network 104 . These findings plus the well-characterized dissociation between physiological arousal and self-report in smokers 13,105 (i.e. Nesbitt's Paradox 106 ) suggest that the subjective point estimates of NWS employed in the current study may have been suboptimal in characterizing changes in the intensity (not to mention the frequency) of affective disruptions associated with changes in TVC.…”