Different modalities provide unique perspectives on the impact of acute nicotine abstinence
anxiety
The overarching goal of this project was to develop a more complete understanding of the psychobiological impact of acute nicotine abstinence and, to that end, we acquired a multimodal battery of subjective (questionnaires and ratings) and objective (skin conductance and fMRI) measures. A natural question concerns the degree to which those ‘readouts’ reflect a single or small number of latent states (e.g., ‘abstinence’ or ‘anxiety’). Do subjective reports of threat-elicited distress covary with objective signs of physiological arousal, for instance? Does BST threat reactivity covary with individual differences in the subjective intensity of smoking urges? To address these questions and inform the interpretation of our primary hypothesis tests, we computed Spearman correlations across all of the measures acquired at the neuroimaging session, both for the entire sample and for the 24-Hour Abstinence group (