Unstuck in time: episodic future thinking reduces delay discounting and cigarette smoking

Abstract

Rationale: Delay discounting, or the devaluation of delayed outcomes, appears to play an etiological role in tobacco and other substance-use disorders.

Objectives: No human studies to our knowledge have been designed to examine whether experimental reductions in delay discounting produce concomitant reduction in drug use.

Methods: Using methods from prior studies on delay discounting and obesity, we examined the effects of episodic future thinking (EFT; a form of mental prospection) on delay discounting and cigarette self-administration in smokers.

Results: Consistent with prior data, EFT significantly reduced both delay discounting (Cohen's d effect size = 0.65) and the number of cigarette puffs earned in a cigarette self-administration task (d = 0.58).

Conclusions: The effects of EFT on delay discounting generalize to smokers; EFT also reduces laboratory-based cigarette self-administration. Potential mechanisms of EFT's effects are discussed as well as implications of EFT for clinical treatment of substance-use disorders.

Keywords: Cigarettes; Delay discounting; Episodic future thinking; Prospection; Smoking.

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.

Discounted value of US$1000 across increasing delays and corresponding values of AUC in EFT (n = 20) and ERT (n = 22) participants (left panels). Also pictured is the number of cigarette puffs earned in the cigarette self-administration task (right panel) in EFT (n = 19) and ERT (n = 22) participants. Error bars represent standard error of the mean. The x axis in the left panel appears in log scale to facilitate inspection of data points at short delays. Data points have also been displaced slightly on this axis, for clarity *p