Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Addictive Behaviors journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/addictbeh Short Communication Sex differences in affect-triggered lapses during smoking cessation: A daily diary study Sylvie Messer a , Atara Siegel b , Lauren Bertin c , Joel Erblich a,d, ⁎ a Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY, United States b University at Albany, Albany, NY, United States c Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States d Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States HIGHLIGHTS • Men reported greater positive-affect-induced smoking lapses than women • Effects of negative-affect-induced lapses subsided over time in men, but persisted in women. • Results further underscore the need to address sex-specificaffective triggers when developing smoking cessation strategies. ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Smoking Lapses Affect Gender ABSTRACT Introduction: Smoking lapses during a cessation attempt are common and are thought to be a key predictor of full relapse. Positive and negative affective states have been hypothesized as important precipitants of lapses during quit attempts, although findings have been mixed. Accumulating evidence suggests that women may smoke more when experiencing negative affective states, while men may smoke more when experiencing positive affective states. The possibility that these sex differences may play a role in predicting lapses during a smoking cessation attempt, however, has not been well-investigated. In this study, we hypothesized that, during a quit attempt, negative affect would be more strongly associated with lapses among women, and positive affect would be more strongly associated with lapses among men. Method: We conducted a prospective study in which male and female nicotine-dependent smokers (n = 60) made an unaided, ‘cold-turkey’ quit attempt. For fourteen days following the initiation of the quit attempt, participants completed daily diaries in which they recorded the degree to which states of ‘good mood’ and ‘bad mood’ preceded smoking lapses. Results: Consistent with the study hypothesis, findings indicated that men reported higher good-mood-induced smoking lapses than women across the 14-day study interval. Conversely, while levels of bad-mood-induced smoking subsided over the 14-day interval among men, levels persisted among women. Discussion: Results further underscore the need to address sex-specificaffective triggers when developing smoking cessation strategies. 1. Introduction Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death; there are nearly 6 million individuals globally who die from smoking-related diseases annually and 556,000 within the U.S. alone (Carter, Abnet, Feskanich, et al., 2015). Despite efforts to develop and enhance methods of smoking cessation, fewer than 6% of those who attempt to quit smoking are successful in quitting for longer than one month (Babb, Malarcher, Schauer, Asman, & Jamal, 2017). As a result, there have been intense efforts to better understand predictors of smoking cessation failure. Smoking lapses during a cessation attempt are common and are thought to be a key predictor of full relapse. Smoking lapses, char- acterized by episodes of smoking during an ongoing quit attempt, have been shown to be predictive of both subsequent lapses, as well as full relapse, or resumption to regular smoking (Ferguson, Gitchell, & Shiffman, 2012; Kenford et al., 1994; US Public Health Service Report, 2008). There are a wide variety of potential triggers of lapses when https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.06.019 Received 22 November 2017; Received in revised form 24 May 2018; Accepted 15 June 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Hunter College, Department of Psychology, HN628, New York, NY 10065, United States. E-mail address: jerblich@hunter.cuny.edu (J. Erblich). Addictive Behaviors 87 (2018) 82–85 Available online 18 June 2018 0306-4603/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T