To examine alternatives regarding the directionality of mediational pathways, we conducted reverse mediation analyses (in which negative urgency was the predictor and AS was the mediator). In individual regression models, negative urgency was significantly associated with smoking outcome (β = .35, p < .0001) and abstinence expectancies (β = .19, p = .007) and proportion of quit attempts involving abstinence of less than one month (β = .21, p = .015) but not with cigarettes per day (β = .11, p = .12). After controlling for anxious arousal and severity of nicotine dependence, negative urgency was still significantly associated with smoking outcome expectancies (β = .29, p < .0001) but not with smoking abstinence expectancies (β = .11, p = .10), proportion of quit attempts in which abstinence could not be maintained for at least one month (β = .15, p = .07), or cigarettes per day (β = .02, p = .74). Reverse mediation analyses revealed a similar pattern of results to the initial mediational analyses for smoking outcome expectancies (unadjusted: β [95% CI] = .092 [.041 – .155];
