Cognitive coping skills and depression vulnerability among cigarette smokers

Cigarette smokers vulnerable to depression experience considerable difficulty quitting smoking, possibly because they use smoking to manage negative affect and possess underdeveloped alternative coping skills for doing so. Efforts to adapt cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) of depression to the treatment of depression-vulnerable smokers have achieved inconsistent results. This research tested one possible explanation for these mixed results, the possibility that depression-vulnerable smokers are not actually deficient in the skills taught in CBT. Regular smokers with a history of major depression, but not currently in a depressive episode (n = 66), scored worse than did never-depressed smokers (n = 68) on the Ways of Responding (WOR; Barber & DeRubeis, 1992) test of skills for coping with negative moods and automatic thoughts. Results were similar in analyses using self-rated depression proneness, rather than interview-based diagnosis of past major depression, as the marker of depression vulnerability. Results were (nonsignificantly) stronger for Caucasian (n = 54) than for African American (n = 73) smokers. Implications for future research on cognitive coping, CBT, and smoking are discussed.