Lapse to drink or not In reading this article about early lapse to drinking and smoking among individuals I learned valuable information. Although there wasn’t as much psychological definition or terms explained in this articles; I felt that the two authors did an excellent job at portraying the reason for when, why, and how people who smoked and drank lapsed or relapsed according to different situations. In the beginning of the article the authors talk about how challenging concurrent treatment poses unique challenges for users. Due to withdraw both substances cause problems that may impede the treatment process. The author stated that when one substance alcohol or smoking becomes a conditioned stimulus the other substance gives the user a craving for one or the other or both. In the first example or experiment spoken about in the article, the author spoke of a meta-analysis of 11 randomly controlled trials on patients or users of substances. From this study it proved that those who received some sort of treatment were 25 % more likely to have extended periods of abstinence that those who didn’t receive any tobacco related treatment at all. When examining the lapse or relapsing of those aiming to quit drinking or smoking it is important to find out the extent of certain changes of variables associated with the initial lapse rather than focusing on traditional individual traits. Secondly the experimenters wanted to focus on the events that led up to the certain lapse or relapsing of current patients in treatment. This allows researchers to determine and explore all angles associated with alcohol and smoking lapses. Although many experiments are controlled or done very carefully the results of said experiments are still subject to mistakes or errors and some have been known to be inaccurate. In regards to PA which is the positive affect, lower levels of PA were associated with shorter time relapse of smoking following an attempt to quit smoking. For me personally I feel that this article explained the facts in the best way possible. Especially when it came to the experiment, which consisted of 48 men and woman who experienced a smoking or drinking lapse during an intensive 1 month EMA monitoring period. Holt and Lin the authors article goes on to describe the procedure “Briefly two out patients substance abuse treatment sites provide a platform of behavioral alcohol and smoking treatment delivered in three months of weekly 1 hr. sessions followed by three monthly booster sessions.” (Holt, Litt, and Cooney) However when the experiment continued randomly assigned participants received a nicotine patch and nicotine gum, and the other participants received nicotine patch and placebo gum. Alcohol treatment if necessary was completed prior to study enrollment. So during this trial and error experiment participants used alcohol heavily nearly 75 percent. Plus the majority of the days involved heavy drinking. Throughout the experiment smoking levels were very high up to 25 cigarettes a day. Many terms are explained in this article including, what the affect was, what a craving baseline was, temptation or self-efficacy, as well as a baseline for nicotine withdrawal. In this article the authors talk about an ecological assessment conducted for four weeks after the start of alcohol treatments. Every participant was given a cellular vevo system to answer a 23item questionnaire. The conductors of the experiment used a scale to measure every participant’s confidence of not using cigs or gum drink, mood, smoke and self-efficacy of resisting cigarettes or gum. Participants were also paid fifty cents each time they completed a system call, plus 5 dollars each day, with the maximum earnings being $215 per day. When it came to analysis the results were sorted into two groups.
The first being predictors of alcohol lapse, the second group is predictors of smoking laps. In the first result the table showed that “indeed, smoking status at time of first drink predicted occurrence of first drink, such as those who were reported smoking one or more cigarettes in any of the IVR records prior to the drinking lapse were 6 times more likely to have a drinking lapse during the 28 day monitoring period than those not smoking.” (Holt, Litt, and Cooney) The second table, showed the 14 day post quit monitoring period showed “positive, high activation mood, confidence to resist smoking and urge to smoke as significant momentary predictors of first cigarettes in the succeeding hours.” (Holt, Litt, and Cooney) Overall from this article I have learned a lot things that I did not know before, but the conclusion of this article is the idea that stuck out the most. Positive affect AP and negative affect NP are explained through the analysis of this experiment. “In the current study, high activation positive mood was protective of smoking lapse, whereas low-activation positive mood, characterized by relaxation and quietness, was not.” (Holt, Litt, and Cooney)