Psychological Symptoms, Smoking Lapse Behavior, and the Mediating Effects of Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms: A Laboratory Study

The influence of psychological symptoms on smoking-lapse behavior is critical to understand. However, this relationship is obscured by comorbidity across multiple forms of psychological symptoms and their overlap with nicotine withdrawal. To address these challenges, we constructed a structural model of latent factors underlying 9 manifest scales of affective and behavioral symptoms and tested relations between latent factors and manifest scale residuals with nicotine withdrawal and smoking lapse in a laboratory analog task. Adult daily smokers (N = 286) completed a baseline session at which several forms of affective and behavioral symptoms were assessed and 2 experimental sessions (i.e., following 16 hr of smoking abstinence and following regular smoking), during which withdrawal symptoms and delay of smoking in exchange for monetary reinforcement, as an analogue for lapse propensity, were measured. A single second-order factor of general psychological maladjustment associated with more severe withdrawal-like symptoms, which in turn associated with shorter delay of smoking. The first-order factors, which tapped qualitatively unique domains of psychological symptoms (low positive affect, negative affect, disinhibition), and the manifest scale residuals provided little predictive power beyond the second-order factor with regard to lapse behavior. Relations among general psychological maladjustment, withdrawal-like symptoms, and lapse were significant in both abstinent and nonabstinent conditions, suggesting that psychological maladjustment, and not nicotine withdrawal per se, accounted for the relation with lapse. These results highlight the potential for smoking-cessation strategies that target general psychological maladjustment processes and have implications for addressing withdrawal-like symptoms among individuals with psychological symptoms.