Personality related effects of nicotine, mode of application, and expectancies on performance, emotional states, and desire for smoking

Abstract

Three separate factors relevant to nicotine effects have been investigated in this experiment in combination: the experimentally induced expectation about receiving a sham or a nicotine cigarette, the mode of application of nicotine by a tablet, by a cigarette or not at all, while the belief of receiving the nicotine via smoking was held constant in each condition (by nicotine or sham smoking), and the personality factors of extraversion or neuroticism, respectively. Ninety-six healthy female student smokers were tested in a 2 x 3 x 2 factorial group comparison design with respect to critical flicker fusion and reaction time performance as well as to self-ratings on emotional and cortical arousal and ratings on desire for further cigarettes (satisfaction from smoking a single cigarette containing either 0.8 mg nicotine or a sham cigarette). In each case, a tablet containing either nicotine or placebo was administered together with the cigarette. The results showed that performance is sensitive to interaction effects of instruction and mode of application. The instruction of sham or nicotine assignment when applied with a congruent treatment (sham with a sham cigarette, or nicotine with a nicotine cigarette) both increased performance, while groups with discordant information showed worse performance. The administration of nicotine by tablets or by smoking differs considerably, nicotine cigarettes causing a stronger increase in emotional arousal, tablets rather a decrease or no effect, while the true placebo condition increases arousal due to deprivation effects. This leads to an enhancement of the nicotine effect with real smoking and to reactive increase of effort when sham smoking. The instruction affects alertness, the nicotine illusion leading to a lower reduction in subjective reports of alertness and concentration than that observed with the sham instruction. Neurotic subjects become more anxious and tense with nicotine cigarettes than stable subjects. This effect is less pronounced or even reversed with tablets. No interactions with instructions are observed with neuroticism. Extraverts tend to show a decrease in performance but an increase in alertness with the instruction of receiving nicotine as opposed to the sham expectation, whereas introverts behave the opposite way. Subjective ratings on arousal seem to follow the law of transmarginal inhibition, with extraverts being pushed from low arousal to high and introverts vice versa by the mere expectation.

Effects of Strain, Behavior and Age on the Self-Administration of Ethanol, Nicotine, Cocaine and Morphine by Two Rat Strains

“…Assuming that uncomfortably high biochemical stress responses are reduced by the sedating effects of ethanol [31][32][33], and perhaps nicotine, highly emotional WKR should consume more of these 2 substances, which they indeed do. Similarly, higher anxiety scores of the WKR should also predict higher ethanol [14,[34][35][36][37] and perhaps nicotine consumption [37], which again was found to be so. In rats bred selectively for their stress responses we found that rats with high plasma catecholamine stress responses consumed more ethanol than did rats with low plasma catecholamine responses whereas both lines did not differ in their cocaine preference [38].…”

Nicotine and cannabinoids: Parallels, contrasts and interactions

“…Thirdly, the negative mood changes may be caused by nicotine itself (Breslau et al, 1998;Parrott, 1999). Perkins et al (1994) found that, compared with placebo, nicotine increased tension, even in smokers, and Netter et al (1998) found that smoking increased feelings of arousal and emotional tension in female smokers and increased ratings of anxiety and sadness in those with higher neuroticism scores. On cessation of smoking, after the first week of abstinence, ex-smokers report better mood and lower anxiety than when they had been smoking (Hughes et al, 1990;West and Hajek, 1997).…”

Placebo effects of tobacco smoking and other nicotine intake

“…To our knowledge, only one other lab study used the balanced-placebo design with cigarettes (Netter, Hennig, Huwe, & Olbrich, 1998), but other features of this study make it difficult to interpret main or interaction effects of nicotine and instructions. Specifically, in addition to assignment of subjects to nicotine and denicotinized research cigarettes (made by Philip Morris, Inc.), this study included random assignment to nicotine or inactive tablets, but all subjects were told the tablet was not nicotine.…”