Can ’t Quit Smoking? It Might Be To Do With How Sad You Are

By Emily Reynolds Emotions have a powerful part to play in both our behavioural choices and our health. Experiencing a range of positive emotions has been associated with lower levels of inflammation, for example, and emotional control has even been linked to higher performance in sportspeople. Negative emotions, too, can have a serious impact on behaviour: research has investigated the emotional triggers of self-harm, for instance. Now new research from Charles Dorison and colleagues at Harvard University, published in PNAS, has looked at the role of negative emotions in addiction. Though some theories say negative mood in general is associated with problematic substance use, the study suggests that, for tobacco at least, it’s sadness per se that is related to addiction. For their first study, the team looked at data from a national survey that tracked 10,685 people over 20 years. It found that sadness significantly predicted smoking status — something that no other emotion, positive or negative, did. There seemed to be a long-term effect, too: sadness reported at the first phase of the data predicted smoking ten and twenty years later. In the second study, which looked at cravings for cigarettes, 425 smokers were placed into three conditions: sadness, disgust and neutral. Those in the sadness condition were shown a clip from the notoriously tear-jerking Pixar film Up, and were then asked to write about a time they themselves had experienced significant loss, like the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Drugs Emotion Smoking Source Type: blogs