The mediational results suggest that smokers high in AS tend to act more impulsively in response to negative affect, which in turn is related to greater expectations of negative reinforcement consequences of smoking and smoking abstinence. Perhaps high-AS individuals perceive anxiety-related states (triggered by any stimulus, including nicotine withdrawal) as being more harmful and consequently are more prone to act on impulse in order to reduce those states (such as by smoking), which is manifested in the form of beliefs that smoking alleviates negative affect and abstinence exacerbates it. Indeed, high-AS smokers report stronger affective reactions to affect-eliciting stimuli, including nicotine withdrawal (Sirota et al., 2013) and a CO2 challenge during tobacco abstinence (Vujanovic and Zvolensky, 2009). Another possibility is that smoking reduces anxiety to a greater extent for high-AS individuals, which increases impulsive smoking and in turn strengthens negative reinforcement-related smoking expectancies. Consistent with this hypothesis, high-AS individuals report greater negative affect reduction from smoking in response to social stress (Evatt and Kassel, 2010; Perkins et al., 2010). It is also worthwhile to note that the remaining direct effects
