Sadness, but not all negative emotions, heightens addictive substance use

Abstract

Do negative feelings in general trigger addictive behavior, or do specific emotions play a stronger role? Testing these alternative accounts of emotion and decision making, we drew on the Appraisal Tendency Framework to predict that sadness, specifically, rather than negative mood, generally, would 1) increase craving, impatience, and actual addictive substance use and 2) do so through mechanisms selectively heightened by sadness. Using a nationally representative, longitudinal survey, study 1 (n = 10,685) revealed that sadness, but not other negative emotions (i.e., fear, anger, shame), reliably predicted current smoking as well as relapsing 20 years later. Study 2 (n = 425) used an experimental design, and found further support for emotion specificity: Sadness, but not disgust, increased self-reported craving relative to a neutral state. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 918) introduced choice behavior as outcome variables, revealing that sadness causally increased impatience for cigarette puffs. Moreover, study 4 revealed that the effect of sadness on impatience was more fully explained by concomitant appraisals of self-focus, which are specific to sadness, than by concomitant appraisals of negative valence, which are general to all negative emotions. Importantly, study 4 also examined the topography of actual smoking behavior, finding that experimentally induced sadness (as compared to neutral emotion) causally increased the volume and duration of cigarette puffs inhaled. Together, the present studies provide support for a more nuanced model regarding the effects of emotion on tobacco use, in particular, as well as on addictive behavior, in general.

Association of Spontaneous and Induced Self-Affirmation With Smoking Cessation in Users of a Mobile App: Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Feeling sadness less frequently at baseline was associated with a greater likelihood of reporting both past-week and past-month cessation. The relationship between sadness and cessation outcomes is consistent with previous theory and research suggesting that sadness facilitates reward-seeking tendencies that might undermine healthy behavior, including smoking cessation [ 55 - 57 ]. Optimism and all affective states (happiness, anger, anxiousness, hopefulness, sadness) were not found to moderate the relationship between the assigned affirmation conditions and successful cessation.…”

“…Currently experienced emotions may also influence smoking cessation; such emotions may trigger action tendencies that facilitate predictable patterns of behavior [ 52 - 54 ]. Sadness, in particular, may be a hindrance to quitting smoking and predicting relapse during the smoking cessation process [ 55 ]. Sadness is associated with reward-seeking tendencies to mitigate loss [ 56 ], which can result in increased hedonically pleasing, but often unhealthy, appetitive behavior [ 57 ], including smoking [ 55 ].…”

“…Sadness, in particular, may be a hindrance to quitting smoking and predicting relapse during the smoking cessation process [ 55 ]. Sadness is associated with reward-seeking tendencies to mitigate loss [ 56 ], which can result in increased hedonically pleasing, but often unhealthy, appetitive behavior [ 57 ], including smoking [ 55 ]. Thus, when current or former smokers feel sad, they may turn to cigarettes in an attempt to improve their mood.…”

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…These disturbing trends are caused partly by heightened levels of negative emotion and diminished levels of positive emotion, which have been found to contribute to a number of negative psychological, behavioural and health consequences. These include increased risk of anxiety and depressive disorders as well as other forms of psychopathology 14 ; impaired social connections 15 ; increased substance use [16][17][18] ; compromised immune system functioning [19][20][21] ; disturbed sleep 22 ; increased maladaptive eating 23,24 ; increased aggressive behaviour 25,26 ; impaired learning 27 ; worse job performance 28,29 ; and impaired economic decision-making 30,31 .…”

Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty

“…For this analysis, we set a very weakly informative prior (normal distribution with mean = 0 and SD = 10) (7). Drawing on previously published methodology and code (8,9), we analyzed studies 1-5 sequentially and then used the final prior as the basis for analysis of study 6. We found the highest density interval (HDI) interval of the standard effect size estimate (for the percent of people cheating per condition) to be [−0.07, 0.14], and 88% of the posterior distribution falls within the ROPE.…”