Prospective emotion regulation in smokers as reflected in self-reports, facial electromyographic and electroencephalogram activity

Abstract

Nicotine addiction is the most prevalent type of drug addiction that has been described as a cycle of spiraling dysregulation of the brain reward systems. It was assumed that addicts may perform less well than healthy nonsmokers in cognitive emotion regulation tasks. The current study applied the appraisal frame paradigm to investigate how smokers differ from nonsmokers on cognitive emotion regulation. Sixty participants (22 nonsmokers, 19 nondeprived smokers and 19 12-h deprived smokers) completed emotion regulation tasks while emotional responses were concurrently recorded as reflected by self-ratings and psychophysiological measures. The results indicated that nondeprived smokers and deprived smokers performed as well as nonsmokers on the emotion regulation task. The lack of group differences in multiple emotional responses (i.e., self-reports, facial EMG activity and brain EEG activity) suggests that nicotine addicts have no deficit in cognitive emotion regulation of natural rewards via appraisal frames. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.