The indirect effect of evaluative conditioning on smoking

Abstract

Dual-process theories can account for the difficulties smokers encounter in their attempt to cease or at least to decrease their smoking consumption. The aim of this study was to test the indirect effect of an evaluative conditioning intervention on reducing the smoking behavior through the serial mediation of implicit and explicit attitudes. Fifty-five smoking addicted students were randomly assigned in two experimental conditions: positively versus negatively conditioned towards smoking related stimuli. The results support the indirect effect. The intervention affects implicit attitudes towards smoking, this leads to changes in explicit attitudes, which finally affects the self-reported smoking behavior in the expected direction (e.g. negative conditioning decreases self-reported smoking consumption).

• Addictive behaviors
• evaluative conditioning
• explicit attitudes
• implicit attitudes
• mediation
• smoking

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Anne Gast and Jan De Houwer for the valuable assistance in designing earlier studies which led to the present research.

Declaration of interest

This work was supported by two grants from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI (PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0230 and PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0621, respectively).

The authors report no conflicts of interest.