Nicotine primes attention to competing affective stimuli in the context of salient alternatives.

Abstract

Despite the importance of the subject, the effects of nicotine on the interplay between affect and attentional bias are not clear. This interplay was assessed with a novel design of the Primed Attentional Competition Task (PACT). It included a 200 ms duration emotional priming picture (negative, positive, or neutral) followed by a dual-target picture of two emotional faces side-by-side. A second task included an emotional priming picture followed by a single emotional target picture in a classic affective priming (CAP) task, assessing RT to identify the valence. Smokers completed the tasks in a double-blind repeated measures design wearing a nicotine patch on one day and a placebo patch on the other day. Consistent with hypotheses, nicotine enhanced the effectiveness of positive primes to bias first gaze-fixations (FGFs) toward positive pictures relative to negative pictures and attenuated the effectiveness of negative primes on FGFs towards negative pictures, but did not bias performance in the CAP task where competing target stimuli were not present. These effects of nicotine on affective priming and attentional bias towards competing reinforcers may contribute to smoking motivation.

Effects of Nicotine and Nicotine Expectancy on Attentional Bias for Emotional Stimuli

“…Our data suggest that smoking abstinence may disrupt these emotional processing correlates of affect regulation, by favoring neutral stimuli over emotion stimuli. However, these data are in contrast to previous evidence of nicotine’s specific effect on attentional bias, with a bias towards positive stimuli and a bias away from negative stimuli (13, 37, 38). This discrepancy may reflect differences in study stimuli and/or nicotine administration, where previous studies have used affective word stimuli and nicotine patches (38).…”

“…Nicotine may therefore function in a similar manner to a positive emotional prime, enhancing the reinforcing value of positive or neutral stimuli, while attenuating the value of negative stimuli competing for attention. Previous studies have shown that nicotine biases attentional processing to increase positive affect and attentional bias towards positive stimuli, whilst reducing attentional bias towards negative stimuli (13,14). These studies use a range of measures for examining attentional biases for emotional stimuli.…”

Nicotine differentially modulates antisaccade eye-gaze away from emotional stimuli in nonsmokers stratified by pre-task baseline performance

“…The use of emotional targets and primes was in part based on evidence that in smokers, nicotine, relative to placebo, reduces attention to and distraction by negative stimuli (relative to positive and to neutral stimuli) as assessed by eye-gaze (Gilbert, Rabinovich et al 2008), brain activation (Engelmann et al 2011; Gilbert et al 2007), emotional prime stimuli preceding targets (Asgaard et al 2010), and RT during task demanding significant executive control and resources (Gilbert et al 2005). Thus, we hypothesized that nicotine would reduce AST RT and increase accuracy on trials with emotionally negative primes and with emotionally negative peripheral stimuli relative to positive and neutral stimuli.…”

The Psychology of the Smoker

“…Nicotine has been found by a number of investigators to enhance attentional bias toward motivation-related (affectinducing stimuli) [27], and some studies and theory suggest that nicotine may reduce attention and associative processes to unpleasant stimuli when the alternative pleasant stimuli are present. The overall findings provide mixed evidence in support of the view that nicotine biases attention towards pleasant and away from unpleasant stimuli when equally salient pleasant and unpleasant stimuli are present [3,21,31]. Nicotine has also been found to enhance hedonic tone and reward sensitivity [2,3,32], something that individuals with temperamentally or environmentally induced low hedonic tone may find highly reinforcing [2,3] (see also chapter 5; fig.…”

“…In general, it seems reasonable to suggest that treatments should be individualized and focused on the RDoC situational and trait vulnerabilities of the given smoker [3]. Research findings and theory suggest that nicotine may bias attention away from negative stimuli when equally salient positive or benign stimuli are present, especially when the affective cues are conditioned or reflect distal threat (anxiety) [3,31]. Attentional modification procedures could prove to be effective for individuals high in NVS traits, though there is little evidence to support this view at this time.…”