Strategies can be employed to better address the relationship between nicotine dependence and withdrawal severity. One strategy is to control for preexisting (baseline) differences in negative affect and craving in order to examine their postcessation relationships to dependence. Unfortunately, the use of such baselines in analyses of postquit negative affect and craving are uncommon (Shiffman, West, & Gilbert, 2004). Another way to address this is to include nonquitting smokers, high and low in nicotine dependence, as a control condition. This would allow for the effects of time to be disentangled from those of quitting on negative affect, effects that are often confounded due to the tendency of negative affect to decrease over repeated measurement, independent of intervention (Gilbert et al., 1998).
