Are Rewards Enough to Make You Quit Smoking? Maybe Not.

Why does smoking cessation work for some individuals and not for others? Researchers have now identified an aspect of brain activity that helps predict the effectiveness of a reward-based strategy to quit smoking.

Using a functional MRI (fMRI), researchers observed the brains of nicotine-deprived smokers and noted that those who were the least enticed by rewards were also the least likely to refrain from smoking—even when offered money to do so.
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Therefore, concepts such as saving money and improving health hold less value for some and have less of an impact on behavior.

“The striatum is part of the so-called reward system in the brain,” said lead author Stephen Wilson, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State. “It is the area of the brain that is important for motivation and goal-directed behavior—functions highly relevant to addiction.”

In the study, researchers tracked 44 smokers (age 18-45) who smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day for the past 12 months. The smokers were asked to abstain from any nicotine products 12 hours prior to arrival.

During the experiment, each participant was hooked up to an fMRI scanner while playing a card-guessing game with the potential to win money. All participants were first informed they would have to wait 2 hours until the game was over to smoke a cigarette.

Midway through the game, half the participants were told there was a mistake and that they would be allowed smoke during a 50-minute break that would occur in another 16 minutes.

When the time came for the cigarette break, the participants were told that for every 5 minutes they did not smoke, they’d earn $1, with potential to earn up to $10.

Wilson et al noticed that smokers who could refrain from smoking showed weaker responses in the ventral striatum when offered monetary rewards.

“Our results suggest that it may be possible to identify individuals prospectively by measuring how their brains respond to rewards, an observation that has significant conceptual and clinical implications,” said Wilson. “For example, particularly ‘at-risk’ smokers could potentially be identified prior to a quit attempt and be provided with special interventions designed to increase their chances for success.”

The full study is in the June issue of Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

References:

Indivero V. Neural reward response may demonstrate why quitting smoking is harder for some [press release]. Penn State. June 12, 2014. http://news.psu.edu/story/318308/2014/06/12/research/neural-reward-response-may-demonstrate-why-quitting-smoking-harder. Accessed June 13, 2014.

Wilson S, Delagado M, McKee S, et al. Weak ventral striatal responses to monetary outcomes predict an unwillingness to resist cigarette smoking. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. 2014 Apr [epub ahead of print] doi:10.3758/s13415-014-0285-8