Imagery and smoking urges: the manipulation of affective content

This study investigated the impact of the affective content of imagery scripts used in an imagery paradigm designed to elicit smoking urges in a laboratory setting. Sixty cigarette smokers were instructed to vividly imagine 10 imagery scripts that described negative affect and explicit smoking urges, positive affect and explicit smoking urges, negative affect alone, positive affect alone, and neutral affect alone. Subjects' ratings of the vividness of their images across the five script types did not differ but ratings of urges and cravings indicated that scripts containing descriptions of smoking urges elicited strong reports of smoking urges/cravings comparable in magnitude across positive and negative affective content. Among scripts that did not explicitly describe smoking urges, negative affect scripts were more effective in generating smoking urges/craving than positive affect scripts, although positive affect scripts did produce significantly stronger urges/cravings than neutral affect scripts. An analysis of subjects' reports of the distribution of their strongest urges over imagery trials and regression analyses of the variables predictive of urge/craving report provided converging evidence that the content of the imagery scripts exerted considerable control over the generation of smoking urges in the imagery paradigm. The results indicated that the magnitude of urges and cravings produced by the imagery manipulation were clearly influenced by urge and affective content of the imagery scripts.