This study investigated the impact of manipulations of affect and abstinence on urges to smoke produced through an imagery paradigm. One hundred smokers imagined audiotaped scripts describing positive affect and smoking urges, positive affect alone, negative affect and smoking urges, negative affect atone, neutral affect and smoking urges, and neutral affect alone. Each volunteer participated in 2 sessions scheduled 6 or 24 hr apart, and half the volunteers refrained from smoking over their intersession interval. Imagery produced effects in physiological responses, self-reported mood, and verbal reports of smoking urges as a function of the urge and affective content of the scripts. In Session 2,6 or 24 hr of abstinence produced a generalized increase in urge report but no evidence of any selective increases in urge, mood, or physiological reactivity as a function of explicit urge or mood content of the scripts. The implications of these results for contemporary models of drug urges are discussed. 198This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

This study evaluated the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and 12-step facilitation (12SF) in treating cocaine abuse. Participants (N = 128) were randomly assigned to treatment conditions and assessed at baseline and at Weeks 4, 8, 12, and 26. Treatment lasted for 12 weeks. It was hypothesized that participants treated with CBT would be significantly more likely to achieve abstinence from cocaine than participants treated with 12SF. A series of patient-treatment matching hypotheses was also proposed. Across 2 different outcome variables, it was found that participants in CBT were significantly more likely to achieve abstinence than participants in 12SF. In addition, some support for matching hypotheses was found, suggesting that both psychotherapies may be differentially effective for identified subgroups of persons that abuse cocaine.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the impact of dose level and interdose interval (IDI) on the development of tolerance to the analgesic effect of morphine. In Experiment 1, rats were administered a series of low- (5 mg/kg) or high- (30 mg/kg) dose injections of morphine either explicitly paired or unpaired with a distinctive context at a 48-hr IDI. The development of tolerance following this regimen was assessed by shifts in dose-response curves to the right when animals were tested on a tail-flick device in the distinctive context. Only animals that had received morphine paired with the distinctive context were tolerant to morphine; the magnitude of this associative tolerance was a positive function of the level of the conditioning dose. In Experiment 2, rats were exposed to a high dose of morphine (30 mg/kg) either paired or unpaired with a distinctive context at one of two IDIs (24 or 96 hr). Tolerance testing revealed that at the long IDI, only associative tolerance was evident, whereas at the short IDI, tolerance in the unpaired condition was more pronounced with a corresponding decline in the development of associative tolerance. The relevance of these findings for psychological theories of drug tolerance are discussed. The overall pattern of results are consistent with the predictions of an habituation model of drug tolerance.

This study investigated whether alcohol use affects baseline characteristics and treatment outcome in 128 adults who participated in a randomized trial of cognitive behavioral vs. 12-step treatment for crack cocaine abuse. Assessments were taken at baseline and weeks 4, 8, 12, and 26 on biologically-verified cocaine abstinence and psychometric measures. Alcohol use was measured at intake and subsequent assessments using the Addiction Severity Index (ASI) and self-reported frequency of alcohol consumption. Results indicate alcohol use at baseline was associated with increased baseline cocaine use and ASI drug severity but was not associated with ASI psychiatric severity, psychiatric diagnoses, or other baseline variables. Alcohol use at baseline did not predict worse treatment outcome for cocaine abstinence. However, alcohol use after four weeks of treatment did predict ability to achieve cocaine abstinence at assessment points during and after treatment.

Three experiments examined the effect of interdose interval (IDI) on the development and retention of associative tolerance to the analgesic effects of morphine. Tolerance was indexed as the magnitude of the shift to the right of the dose-response curve (DRC). Experiment 1 showed that associative tolerance was characterized by a parallel shift in the DRC to the right in rats that had received morphine explicitly paired with the distinctive test context at 12-, 24-, and 96-hr IDIs. Associative tolerance was attenuated at the shortest IDI. Experiment 2 revealed that associative tolerance that developed in the 12- and 96-hr IDI conditions showed comparable levels of retention at 30 days. Experiment 3 showed that associative tolerance was not disrupted by the administration of unsignaled doses of morphine 12 hr before each drug-context pairing. Theoretical and methodological implications of the data are discussed.