Grant Number:	1R01CA293884-01A1 Interpret this number
Primary Investigator:	Sayette, Michael
Organization:	University Of Pittsburgh At Pittsburgh
Project Title:	The Impact of Dyadic Processes on Smoking and Cigarette Craving: an Experimental Investigation of Romantic Partners and Smoking Friends
Fiscal Year:	2025

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of cancer and mortality in the US, with Covid hitting smokers especially hard. Quitting is difficult (and smoking increased during Covid), yet interventions yield only mixed success. Smokers often smoke and crave cigarettes in social settings. Public health research emphasizes social factors in smoking, and clinical studies point to the need to better understand disrupted relationship dynamics when a romantic partner or friend quits. Thus, it is striking that nearly all lab research (testing causal relations) on smoking and craving tests smokers in isolation. This neglect of social factors extends to quitting practices. Even on the most respected websites, the “social” advice for quitting offers fairly simplistic and incomplete tips that fail to consider subtle yet powerful challenges that quitting may create for smoking friends and romantic partners. Further, there is no evidence regarding how social factors exacerbate the altered smoking-related decision-making that accompanies craving, thus raising the likelihood of smoking. To develop a comprehensive understanding of the factors and processes that maintain smoking and increase relapse risk, basic experimental research that integrates social processes into existing paradigms focusing on pharmacologic and (individual) psychological aspects of addiction is needed. This basic experimental study with humans (BESH) application addresses targeted NCI Behavioral Research Program priorities focused on leveraging research on dyadic processes to examine health-related behaviors such as smoking cessation. Integrating theory and research derived from three disciplines rarely applied to smoking (experimental social psychology with a focus on dyadic processes, affective science, cognition), the project will offer a multimodal analysis of craving and smoking in two social contexts relevant to smoking (friendships, romantic couples). This project will use innovative measures of affect (e.g., an urge pressure dynamometer, speech volume, Facial Action Coding System) and decision-making to test theoretically-derived processes (e.g., shared reality, motivated reasoning, emotional contagion) that may help explain the challenges linked to quitting when rewarding social aspects of smoking are lost. The project will elucidate why some smokers may struggle managing relationships when quitting, and why social interventions may be most useful for a subset of smokers. In both a friends study and a couples study, abstinent daily and nondaily smokers will be recruited. The friends study will test the impact of a friend’s presence on cue-elicited craving, with a focus on shared craving states, and the couples study will target effects of mutual smoking versus unilateral smoking on critical social interactions and relationship perceptions thought to raise obstacles to quitting. This project will test important social-cognitive and socio- emotional mechanisms underlying craving and smoking that may identify hidden social motives for smoking that must be integrated into biopsychosocial smoking treatment. Regardless of outcome, this work will provide valuable data on emotional and cognitive processes experienced in social settings during craving and smoking.





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