Cigarette smoking and attention to signals of reward and threat in the Stroop paradigm

Abstract

This pattern suggests suppression of normal motivational responding during abstinence.

A double-blind placebo controlled experimental study of nicotine: I—effects on incentive motivation

“…The present study aimed to replicate and extend the findings of Powell et al (2002aPowell et al ( , 2002b). Neither of these previous studies used a blinded design and both used smokers who had either abstained or recently smoked cigarettes; thus the observed performance enhancements may have reflected demand characteristics and could not definitively be attributed to nicotine since this is one of many active ingredients in cigarettes.…”

“…The average card sorting rate (cards per second) in the two non-rewarded trials is computed and the rate of increase in card sorting under R versus NR is taken to index 'reward responsivity'. (Powell et al 2002b). This measures the extent to which attention is 'captured' by various classes of motivationally salient stimuli.…”

“…The first four measures described here were as administered in our previous studies (Powell et al 2002a;2002b;2004) Anhedonia: The Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS; Snaith et al 1995). This 14-item self-report scale is designed to measure hedonic tone in both healthy and clinical populations.…”

“…It is relevant to note here that whereas Robinson and Berridge's (1993; incentive sensitisation model restricts itself to the appetitive domain others highlight the critical involvement of DA in responses to stimuli with both appetitive and aversive motivational salience (Gray et al 1997;Salamone 1994). Using an 'emotional' variant of the Stroop task in which participants had to name the ink colour of appetitive, aversive and neutral words, we previously found that non-smokers, and smokers who had just had a cigarette, were slower than abstinent smokers in colournaming both appetitive and aversive words compared with neutral words (Powell et al 2002b). This indicates reduced attentional 'capture' by motivational words in the latter group regardless of their valence.…”

The Role of Executive Control in Human Drug Addiction

“…Human drug addiction is a complex multifactorial phenomenon that features, with remarkable consistency, a difficulty in directing attention away from salient drug-related stimuli. Behavioral studies have shown that processing a nonsalient stimulus in the presence of a salient drug-related stimulus presents a significant difficulty for those dependent on cocaine (Copersino et al 2004;Hester et al 2006), alcohol (Sharma et al 2001;Ryan 2002;Cox et al 2003;Duka and Townshend 2004a, b), cannabis (Field et al 2004a), nicotine (Wertz and Sayette 2001;Powell et al 2002;Waters et al 2003;Bradley et al 2004;Field et al 2004b), or heroin (Lubman et al 2000;Franken et al 2003). Similarly, electrophysiological studies, which are able to directly quantify the allocation of processing resources to specific stimuli independently of conscious awareness, demonstrate enhanced event-related potential (ERP) responses to drugrelated stimuli compared to nonsalient stimuli across a range of addicted populations (Warren and McDonough 1999;Herrmann et al 2000Herrmann et al , 2001Franken et al 2003;van de Laar et al 2004;Lubman et al 2007b.…”