Our study focused on examining the affect-modulated startle response of 69 participants (32 men, 37 women) who were assigned to the behavioral smoking treatment condition and 46 participants (28 men, 18 women) who were assigned to the control condition. We hypothesized that smokers who failed to quit would exhibit significantly higher negative affective reactivity than smokers who abstained. However, we failed to find a significant main effect for abstinence status (i.e., control participants, abstaining participants, and nonabstaining participants) on startle response; nor did we find any significant interaction effect among abstinence status, stimulus valence (i.e., pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, and cigarette), and postcessation time points on startle response.
