Effects of escalating and descending schedules of incentives on cigarette smoking in smokers without plans to quit

Abstract

Contingent incentives can reduce substance abuse. Escalating payment schedules, which begin with a small incentive magnitude and progressively increase with meeting the contingency, increase smoking abstinence. Likewise, descending payment schedules can increase cocaine abstinence. The current experiment enrolled smokers without plans to quit in the next 6 months and compared escalating and descending payments schedules over 15 visits. In the larger incentive condition (LI, n = 39), the largest possible incentive was $100, and in the smaller incentive condition (SI, n = 18), the largest possible incentive was $32. In both conditions, more participants in the descending groups initiated abstinence. A higher proportion of participants in both the escalating and descending groups initiated abstinence in the LI than in the SI. Although participants in the descending groups had more abstinent visits during the first five contingent visits than those in the escalating groups, these differences were not maintained.

Keywords: cigarette smoking; contingency management; reinforcement schedules; smoking cessation.

Figures

Figure 1

Event records of participants in the descending and escalating groups. The left panel represents participants in the larger incentive condition (LI), and the right panel represents participants in the smaller incentive condition (SI). Individual participant numbers are given on the ordinate, and visit number is shown on the abscissa. The darker gray areas represent visits with a breath CO

Figure 2

Amount of incentive lost as a function of an increasing number of visits not meeting the breath CO criterion during the larger incentive condition (LI). Open triangles represent the escalating incentive contingency. Filled squares represent the descending incentive contingency.