ATTENTIONAL MEDIATION OF CIGARETTE SMOKINGS EFFECT ON ANXIETY

It was hypothesized that smoking's calming effects are cognitively med iated and depend on the presence of a benign distractor; smoking narro ws the focus of attention, thereby reducing anxiety by facilitating di straction from stressful cognitions (cf. C. M. Steele & R. A. Josephs' s [1988] attention-allocation model of alcohol reinforcement). This no tion was tested by examining the effect of smoking (vs. not smoking) o n anxiety with and without a concurrent distraction in 82 smokers; dis traction effects were also assessed in 42 nonsmokers. As predicted, sm oking reduced anxiety only when paired with a distracter. Further, the se findings could not be explained by direct nicotine effects or nicot ine withdrawal. Several measures of attention allocation failed to con firm the hypothesized cognitive mechanisms, however. Implications of t he findings are discussed.