Within this framework, individual differences in sensitivity to both smoking reward and nondrug rewards may contribute to the decision to smoke, thereby providing a laboratory corollary to real-world smoking behavior, in which except the choice to smoke involves weighing trade-offs between motivation to smoke and benefits of abstaining. In the present study, we developed a laboratory abstinence incentive test to approximate a quit attempt among nontreatment seeking individuals lasting 1 week and using a descending payment schedule for reinforcement of abstinence. A 1-week time frame was chosen to capture the initial volatile period during which most smoking lapses occur (Brown et al., 2009; Garvey, Bliss, Hitchcock, Heinold, & Rosner, 1992) and to minimize the burden of daily laboratory assessments.
Incentive amounts were selected to maximize intersubject variability in order to examine predictors of outcomes within the model. A high initial payment ($75) was used to encourage the initiation of abstinence among all participants and enable measurement of abstinence-induced craving and withdrawal, while a descending schedule was chosen in order to shorten the time to first lapse (Mueller et al., 2009) to facilitate assessment within a short-term laboratory model. In adopting this approach, we sought to expand beyond the existing literature in two ways. Whereas several previous investigations have examined latency to smoke following a specific manipulation within a single laboratory session (Leeman et al., 2010; McKee et al.
, 2006), the current extension of the abstinence assessment across multiple days including only brief laboratory visits allows for a more naturalistic assessment of smoking behavior, thereby more closely approximating an actual quit attempt. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies assessing reinstatement of smoking behavior following an initial ��priming�� exposure in a subset of individuals achieving initial abstinence over a period of several days (Chornock et al., 1992; Juliano et al., 2006), the present model sought to evaluate the early phases of a quit attempt in all participants, examining the ability to initiate abstinence and avoid a first lapse. Within this framework, we explored whether known predictors of abstinence in full-scale clinical trials��namely, nicotine dependence, craving, and withdrawal��predicted variability in time to first lapse. We included the Wisconsin Inventory of Smoking Dependence Motives (WISDM), the Nicotine Dependence Batimastat Syndrome Scale (NDSS), and the Fagerstr?m Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND) as measures of dependence, all of which have been previously shown to predict cessation success in clinical trials (Baker et al., 2007; Piper et al., 2008).
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