Evaluating the role of anxiety sensitivity in smoking outcome expectancies among regular smokers. Cognitive Therapy and Research

The present study evaluated the association between the lower-order facets of anxiety sensitivity construct (physical, mental incapacitation, and social concerns) and posi-tive (expectancies about negative affect reduction) and negative (expectancies about negative personal consequences) smoking outcome expectancies. Participants were 90 young adult regular smokers [37 females; Mage = 23.4 years (SD = 8.9); mean number of cigarettes/day = 11.7 (SD = 6.1)] with no history of psychopathology or nonclinical panic attacks recruited from the general population. Anxiety sensitivity physical concerns and mental incapacitation concerns, as indexed by the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI; S. Reiss, R. A. Peterson, M. Gursky, & R. J. McNally, 1986), were significantly and incrementally associated with smoking outcome expectancies, as indexed by the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T. H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), for negative affect reduction as well as negative personal consequences; the observed effects were over and above the variance accounted for by theoretically relevant smoking history characteristics, gender, and negative affectivity. Results are discussed in relation to better understanding motivational processes fo