To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine interrelations between AS, negative urgency, and negative reinforcement-related smoking expectancies. In accord with hypotheses, AS was associated with stronger expectancies that smoking attenuates negative affect and smoking abstinence increases aversive states. These results are consistent with past work in predominately white smokers (Brown et al., 2001; Gregor et al., 2007; Leyro et al., 2008) and extend them to an ethnically heterogeneous sample of moderate-to-heavy chronic smokers. This study also extends the only prior study we are aware of that examined bivariate relations between AS and smoking abstinence expectancies (Abrams et al., 2011), as here we show that the relation of AS and smoking expectancies remained after controlling for anxiety symptoms and severity of nicotine dependence, which had not been previously explored.
