The use of multimodal measures to assess negative affect in craving in nicotine-dependent individuals offers advantages over the typical reliance on retrospective self-report. First, when multimodal measures are in concordance, this provides additional evidence that the motivational phenomenon of interest is not simply the result of some cognitively mediated evaluation. That is, the motivational state being assessed is reflective of some biological substrate (i.e., withdrawal) and not of a frontal-lobe mediated reconstruction of how a person “should” feel. Second, when multimodal measures are in discordance, this could be reflective of the presence of co-occurring, even potentially conflicting, motivational states. Recent theoretical models acknowledge that individuals often experience conflicting motivational states (Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo, 2001), many of which are outside of awareness but influence behavior nonetheless (Berridge & Winkielman, 2003).
