Dependency-related emotions differ in cigarette users vs. e-cigarette/cigarette dual users

Dependency-related emotions among people who both smoke and vape may differ from those among people who only smoke, according to study results published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

“This study explores whether specific emotion dynamics are related to cigarette dependence and specific facets of cigarette dependence (ie, do smokers with higher levels of dependence also have higher levels of affective variability, higher levels of sustained negative or positive affect, or greater magnitude of changes in negative affect),” Anne Buu, PhD, of the department of health promotion and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center, and colleagues wrote. “Such findings would suggest that short-term emotion dysregulation may serve as a harbinger of longer-term cigarette dependence. Furthermore, the patterns of association between emotion dynamics and cigarette dependence are compared across dual users and exclusive smokers.”

The investigators conducted secondary analysis on data of a community sample of 136 dual users who used e-cigarettes and cigarettes, as well as 101 exclusive smokers, all of whom completed the 2-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and cigarette dependence assessments in a recent study.

Results showed dual users had an association between higher cigarette dependence and more intense bad moods, shorter duration of bad mood and higher positive mood swings. Exclusive smokers had different patterns of associations, with longer negative moods, less pronounced swings in positive moods and higher variability of negative moods associated with higher dependence.

“This study has built an important bridge between the psychology literature and the literature of nicotine and tobacco research that offers some important insight into the association between short-term emotion dynamics and cigarette dependence,” Buu and colleagues wrote. “Our findings demonstrate that in addition to the commonly calculated mean and variance, the novel measures for inertia and instability may be important to characterize emotion dynamics across cigarette use events. Further research is needed to understand the relations between such emotion dynamics and continued smoking over time.”