Cigarette smoking: Habit or nicotine maintenance? effects of short‐term smoking abstinence and oversmoking

Abstract

Cigarette consumption, craving to smoke and smoking pleasure, subjective reasons for smoking, heart rate, motor activity, and nutrient intake were continuously assessed in 22 subjects. After ad lib smoking on the first experimental day, subjects had to abstain between 12:30 h and 17:30 h on the second day and to smoke twice the habituated number of cigarettes during the same period of the third day. Craving and smoking pleasure decreased during oversmoking and increased for the first cigarettes after abstinence. Activity adjusted heart rates decreased by about 5 bpm during abstinence. In the evenings, however, these parameters as well as smoking rates, subjective reasons for smoking, and nutrient intake remained completely unaffected by the previous manipulations. Also cardiac nicotine tolerance, as assessed by the increases of the averaged activity-adjusted heart rates after cigarette lighting, was identical for all three evenings, irrespective of the afternoon smoking condition. Furthermore, none of the subjective effects of the afternoon abstinence was observed for the longer lasting overnight deprivation. These results suggest that habituated temporal patterns play a role in cigarette smoking which is perhaps even more important than the need to maintain a constant plasma nicotine level.

Do smokers self-administer pure nicotine? A review of the evidence

“…Robinson and Pritchard 1992;Jacober et al 1994;Warburton 1995;Gori 1996;Frenk and Dar 2000;Atrens 2001). Problems in the nicotine addiction account of smoking arise from a large variety of findings that appear to contradict it.…”

“…While researchers are increasingly voicing the opinion that non-nicotine factors may be crucial in accounting for the ubiquity and persistence of smoking (Rose et al 1993(Rose et al , 2000Jacober et al 1994;Shahan et al 2001;Caggiula et al 2002) and that the claims regarding the addictive properties of nicotine have been overstated (Warburton 1995;Gori 1996), most continue to maintain that nicotine is a powerful primary reinforcer and that its reinforcing properties are essential to smoking behavior.…”

Craving to smoke in orthodox Jewish smokers who abstain on the Sabbath: a comparison to a baseline and a forced abstinence workday

“…The role of habit in determining craving to smoke and other smoking parameters was demonstrated in a study by Jacober et al (1994). Smokers were asked to smoke ad lib, abstain, and finally oversmoke in three consecutive afternoons.…”

Reevaluating the nicotine delivery kinetics hypothesis

“…For example, Chaudhri et al (2006) have suggested that nicotine may be a weak primary reinforcer but that it nevertheless contributes to smoking by enhancing the value of the other nonnicotine reinforcers. In addition, a growing body of research demonstrates that smoking is significantly determined by habits, cues, and expectations (e.g., Jacober et al 1994;Dols et al 2002;Dar et al 2005;Juliano and Brandon 1998). This research underscores the importance of understanding smoking not only in pharmacological terms but also as a behavioral habit (Neal et al 2006), a perspective that may facilitate the development of new cognitive-behavioral strategies for smoking reduction.…”