A simple test to assess the emotional status of smokers

Smokers exhibit a high prevalence of psychological abnormalities, and these factors may contribute to smoking initiation, its maintenance, and quitting difficulties. This study reports the development of a scale aiming at evaluating the emotional status of smokers in face of tobacco.

Levels of Anxiety, Depression, Perceived Stress, Self-esteem, and Loneliness of 120 smokers (age: 54.6 years; 74 women) were compared with those of 76 nonsmokers (age: 45.5 years; 47 women). Correlations between psychological scores, plus the feature Attachment to Cigarettes, and Fagerström test of nicotine dependence (FTND) counts were explored. Features showing the best correlations with FTND were selected to be part of a 6-item scale called Smoker's Emotional Test (SET). SET scores of this group and of an additional sample of smokers (n = 102; age = 52.6; women = 63) were submitted to psychometric analyses and validation tests.

SET showed a structure of two factors, Anxiety/Depression and Attachment to Cigarettes. SET showed significant correlations with FTND (r = 0.418), number of smoked cigarettes (r = 0.299), time to urge for a new cigarette (r = -0.441), and pleasure of smoking (r = 0.346). The internal consistency of SET was higher than that of FTND scores (Cronbach's alpha: respectively .712 and .542). The test-retest reliability of SET was excellent (ICC = 0.944). SET scores higher than four distinguished smokers from nonsmokers with sensitivity of 87.3% and specificity of 92.7%.

SET is a simple instrument that gives an estimative of smoking-related emotional status and may define a new valuable construct of tobacco addiction.