Postcessation negative affect has been found to predict smoking relapse in retrospective (Piasecki, Kenford, Smith, Fiore, & Baker, 1997; Wetter et al., 1999) and prospective studies (Shiffman & Waters, 2004). However, do smokers who relapse experience an improvement in their affect once they resume smoking? Unfortunately, negative affect following smoking relapse has not received much scrutiny and has produced equivocal results. Some studies, involving unaided quitters, have found that relapsers experience greater negative affect than abstainers over time (Carey, Kalra, Carey, Halperin, & Richards, 1993; Cohen & Lichtenstein, 1990). In a previous study, we provided an intensive counseling intervention to smokers with current threshold and subthreshold depressive disorders who were seeking to quit smoking and found that relapsers experienced decreased positive affect and increased depressive symptoms and craving over time compared to abstainers (Blalock, Robinson, Wetter, Schreindorfer, & Cinciripini, 2008). However, Gilbert and colleagues found that, compared to a nonquitting control group, unaided male (Gilbert et al., 1998) and female (Gilbert et al., 2002) quitters experienced increased negative affect that was unabated for up to a month postquit.
