Emotional reactivity to emotional and smoking cues during smoking abstinence: Potentiated startle and P300 suppression

Abstract

Negative affect is thought to be an important factor in the maintenance of cigarette smoking, and thus it is important to further develop objective measures of smoking-related emotional responses. Nonsmokers, nonabstinent smokers, and abstinent smokers participated in a cue reactivity task where eyeblink startle amplitude and startle probe P300 (P3) suppression were measured during the presentation of emotional pictures. During unpleasant pictures, the amplitude of both measures was smaller in nonabstinent smokers than in nonsmokers or abstinent smokers. P3 suppression, but not startle amplitude, was larger in abstinent smokers than in nonsmokers. Abstinence-induced increases in cigarette craving were associated with P3 suppression during tobacco-related pictures. Results suggest that tobacco abstinence increases emotional reactivity to unpleasant stimuli, which is consistent with negative reinforcement models of tobacco addiction.

Alpha Oscillations in Response to Affective and Cigarette-Related Stimuli in Smokers

“…than intrinsically emotional cues Engelmann, Gewirtz, & Cuthbert, 2011;Geier, Mucha, & Pauli, 2000). Additionally, a recent study in our laboratory found a similar effect using event-related potentials to measure brain electrical activity evoked by cigarette-related and emotional stimuli in smokers.…”

“…First, we do not know whether our finding was specific to smokers, or whether nonsmokers show similar responses to cigarette-related cues. This needs to be directly tested, but significant alpha ERD to cigarette-related cues among nonsmokers is not expected in light of previous studies in which self-report, psychophysiological, or blood oxygenation level-dependent responses were directly compared between smokers and nonsmokers (David et al, 2005;Due, Huettel, Hall, & Rubin, 2002;Engelmann et al, 2011;Geier et al, 2000;Littel & Franken, 2007;Rubinstein, Luks, Dryden, Rait, & Simpson, 2011;Warren & McDonough, 1999). In all of these studies, nonsmokers showed no evidence of significant reactivity to cigarette-related cues.…”

“…Exposure to cigarette-related cues is thought to precipitate smoking relapse (Shiffman et al, 1996). However, smokers tend to rate these stimuli as low or moderately arousing Engelmann et al, 2011;Geier et al, 2000), which is somewhat at odds with the notion that cigarette-related cues precipitate relapse because they are attributed a high level of incentive salience (Robinson & Berridge, 2003). Self-report measures cannot provide reliable information about the brain mechanisms activated by drug cues.…”

“…For high-arousal pictures, the subcategories were erotica and mutilations, the normative arousal ratings for which were 6.29 and 6.36, respectively. Cigarette-related pictures, which have not been normed with respect to valence and arousal ratings but have been rated as more arousing than neutral and less arousing than emotional pictures in previous studies Engelmann et al, 2011;Geier et al, 2000), were considered a separate category, so that they could be compared with the low-, medium-, and high-arousal pictures. Finally, it should be noted that the normative ratings of valence and arousal for the emotional pictures did not differ across the three picture sets, and the specific pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System are listed in one of our previous reports (Versace et al, in press).…”

Modulation of the startle response in verbal aggressors: Differences among stimuli with distinct affective social content.

“…Research on the biological basis of personality traits and mental disorders has shown a relationship between psychophysiological variables and psychopathic traits (Anderson, Wan, Young, & Stanford, 2011;Casey, Rogers, Burns, & Yiend, 2013), anxiety (Delgado, Guerra, Perakakis, Mata, Perez, & Vila, 2009;Garner, Clarke, Graystone, & Baldwin, 2011), tobacco consumption (Cui et al, 2012;Engelmann, Gewirtz, & Cuthbert, 2011;Muñoz, Idrissi, Sánchez-Barrera, Fernández-Santaella, & Vila, 2013;Muñoz, Viedmadel-Jesus, Fernández-Santaella, Peralta-Ramírez, Cepeda-Benito, & Vila, 2010), and externalizing traits (Baskin-Sommers, Curtin, Larson, Stout, Kiehl, & Newman, 2012), among others. One of the most frequent psychophysiological outcomes is a change in the modulation of the startle reflex.…”