Responses to cigarette and coffee cues in smokers and coffee drinkers: An examination of the roles of conditioning factors and stages of change

By virtue of reliably signaling imminent ingestion of a psychoactive substance, cues associated with substance use (e.g., needle, pipe) acquire the ability to elicit conditioned responses. The Conditioned Compensatory Response (CCR) model predicts that drug related stimuli elicit conditioned drug-opposite responses. In contrast, the Conditioned Appetitive Motivational (CAM) model predicts that drug-related stimuli elicit drug-like responses. The Conditioned Withdrawal (CW) model postulates that drug cues induce withdrawal. Past research has found that ex-heroin and ex-alcohol addicts are physiologically reactive and report negative emotional responses to cues related to their drug of choice. This finding has often been interpreted as support for the CCR and CW models. The elicitation of negative affect, however, may not represent a conditioned response, but rather a response triggered by reminding subjects of the very drugs that have caused them considerable distress. This project extended past research by recruiting ninety current smokers and thirty-two current coffee-drinkers in order to rule out this alternative explanation. Subjects watched videotapes containing smoking cues or coffee cues. Emotional, self-reported somatic, and physiological responses were assessed. Subjects' responses to the drug video were contrasted with their responses to a neutral videotape and to responses of non-smoker or non-coffee drinker controls. In contrast to controls, smokers and coffee-drinkers reported significant increases in positive affect in response to the drug videotape. Heart rate increased for coffee drinkers in response to drug-cues, but decreased for smokers. The affective data from smokers and coffee-drinkers and heart rate data from coffee drinkers supports the CAM model. Smokers contemplating quitting had higher heart rates and reported feeling more guilty than noncontemplators in response to the smoking videotape, suggesting that the point on the continuum of change processes where a person falls (as opposed to conditioning history) may mediate cue-reactivity.