In sum, despite the critical role of withdrawal, craving, PA, and NA in the dynamic process of smoking lapse and relapse, little is known about 1) the temporal and predictive relationship between these withdrawal-related constructs during early abstinence and 2) how smoking heaviness affect the trajectories and relationships between these key psychological constructs. Furthermore, EMA studies have typically employed either a multilevel modeling (MLM) framework to examine within-person associations between variables at a defined moment in time or, more recently, time-varying effect models to understand the pattern of within-person association between variables over time (e.g. Shiyko, Lanza, Tan, Li, & Shiffman, 2012; Shiyko et al., 2014). However, using such EMA analytical techniques cannot examine whether the rates of change or trajectories of craving, withdrawal, NA, and PA are associated over the course of abstinence. The present pilot study aimed to address these gaps in the literature by using both MLM and a series of multivariate random coefficient models (MRM) to elucidate the interplay between craving, withdrawal, PA, and NA trajectories in early smoking abstinence.
