Carson Moore – Headshot

Author: Carson Moore | Major: Psychological Science | Semester: Spring 2023

This past spring marked my second semester within Dr. Darya Zabelina’s MoCCA Lab working on my thesis on the impact of future thinking and mindfulness on chronic smoking. Prior semesters laid the groundwork for what I found to be the hardest part of my thesis experience- actually writing about and presenting my work. Up to this point, the bulk of my time had been spent running participants, analyzing previous literature and sorting data.

The focus of my thesis was on how episodic future thinking and mindfulness interact with motivation to quit smoking in chronic smokers in a real world setting. Currently, chronic smokers who want to quit have a hard time doing so due to the insufficiency of existing smoking cessation techniques. For example, those who use medications for treatment often face severe side effects that are typically worse than withdrawal. Having reliable smoking cessation aids that are accessible and person-centered is an essential resource for chronic smokers who want to quit. Thus, it was really important to me that my research analyzed potential alternatives in a real world setting.

Separately, episodic future thinking and mindfulness have each been shown to reduce cigarette consumption in a laboratory setting. Episodic future thinking (EFT) can most simply be thought of as a process where individuals are asked to think about or simulate an event that could happen in the future. Mindfulness occurs when thought processes and behavior are intentional, non-judgemental and accepting.

The intersection between EFT and mindfulness lies with their individual impact on delay discounting- which is an important process for any addictive behavior. Delay discounting occurs when a smaller more immediate reward is chosen or prioritized over a larger future reward. In chronic smoking this can occur when someone chooses the instant reward of smoking a cigarette over the long-term benefit that comes with quitting. Importantly, both EFT and mindfulness have been shown separately to reduce delay discounting behavior and impulsivity. I hypothesized that those who have higher baseline mindfulness and are in the EFT condition will have larger motivation to quit smoking.

To measure current mindfulness, participants filled out an initial qualtrics questionnaire that included the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. EFT represented the experimental condition with episodic recent thinking being the control condition. Episodic recent thinking is an alternative to EFT that has individuals think about an event that already occurred in the recent past. Our participants were Arkansas residents ages 21-65 who had been smoking at least five cigarettes per day for at least two years but were interested in quitting and who had access to a smartphone device for the real world portion of the study. To gather real world data, the participants responded to several daily condition specific prompt notifications from an app.

Though we did not find a significant interaction between EFT and mindfulness on motivation to quit smoking. I was able to do an exploratory analysis of craving as an alternative dependent variable which had some interesting results. Namely, there was a significant relationship between EFT, the describe subfactor of the FFMQ and craving. One takeaway from this, supported by additional research, is that mindfulness based training that focuses on teaching individuals to describe the experience of craving and allows them to practice through EFT prompts could still be a viable smoking cessation technique. Future studies should analyze this relationship more and maintain a focus on real world data collection to boost the ecological validity of the results.

Overall, the most difficult challenge I faced with this project was also my favorite part of the project which was finding connections between all of my variables. I really enjoyed the process of digging through prior literature to find commonalities between EFT and mindfulness and even though our study did not support their ability to attenuate motivation to quit, considering craving opens several different avenues for future research. Putting all of these variables together and formulating them in writing felt like finding missing pieces to a puzzle. However, it admittedly took lots of time and persistence to continue to sort through various studies and consider their implications alongside my results.

The past spring semester built up to the finalization of my thesis and my thesis defense and was a period of great academic progress for me personally. As this was my last semester as an undergraduate student, completing my thesis was a major factor in graduation. Thus, I must acknowledge how important the help of my mentor, Dr. Darya Zabelina, and of the Honors College was towards this milestone. Receiving the Honors College Research Grant allowed me to dedicate more quality time towards my thesis, allowing me to present something I could be proud of. I am sincerely so grateful to have more direct experience conducting, writing about, and presenting my research and it would not have been possible without the vast support from the University of Arkansas.