Smoking expectancy associates among college smokers

Abstract

Although it has been suggested that implicit expectancies influence smoking and other addictive behaviors, there is little direct evidence to support this notion. This study offers the first step in exploring implicit expectancy operation in cigarette smoking. Ninety-nine college smokers completed the sentence, "Smoking makes one_____." with as many words as possible within 30 s, developing a list of expectancy associates. The results of the sentence completion task were positively correlated with an explicit measure of smoking-related expectancies. Future studies will be able to use the expectancy associates developed by this study to employ implicit memory tasks and further the understanding of the role of smoking-related expectancies.