Roar Articles

Linking emotional triggers for smoking with better addiction treatments

Research conducted by:

Runze Li, Eberly Family Chair in Statistics and professor of Public Health Sciences

Tags:

addiction antismoking health

Research Summary:

Researchers have known that emotions play a critical, but complex role in shaping dependency on smoking and vaping. Li and his collaborators found that the triggers for people who both smoke and vape may be different from people who just smoke. The researchers said it could lead to finding more personalized treatment programs to help people quit tobacco smoking and vaping.

How Roar played a role in this research:

Collecting data about smoking and vaping present two challenges. First, there are many variables involved, which creates a lot of data. Second, it's difficult to replicate conditions in a lab that might trigger addictive behavior. The researchers used mobile computing devices that allowed the study participants to record data in near real time. The researchers said that this created a large amount of data that required the computational power of a supercomputer to investigate correlations between the variables.

Publication Details

Article Title:

The association between short-term emotion dynamics and cigarette dependence: A comprehensive examination of dynamic measures

Published In:

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Abstract:

The association between short-term emotion dynamics and long-term psychopathology has been well established in the psychology literature. Yet, dynamic measures for inertia and instability of negative and positive affect have not been studied in terms of their association with cigarette dependence. This study builds an important bridge between the psychology and substance use literatures by introducing these novel measures and conducting a comprehensive examination of such association with intervention implications.

View article on publisher's website

Related Articles