Pre-Test of For the Future Self: A Behavioral Intervention to Increase Success in a Smoking Cessation Program

Several factors are thought to be relevant to the level of adherence such as the initial level of nicotine addiction (Orleans et al., 1994), gender (Gritz, Nielsen, & Brooks, 1996), concerns over weight gain due to smoking cessation (Fagerström, 2002) and side effects (Burns & Levinson, 2008). On the other hand, combining nicotine replacement treatment with behavioral therapy has been shown to improve adherence and overall abstinence (Cooper et al., 2004) and motivation is found to be an important factor related to patch use (Alterman, Gariti, Cook, & Cnaan, 1999).

Can a more vivid connection to an individual's future self facilitate smoking cessation? While behavioral interventions that enhance connection to the future self have been proven effective at mitigating present bias, they have so far been done in domains that require self-restraint (e.g., delinquency). Smoking cessation does in part require restraint, but a cessation program utilizing the nicotine patch also requires proactive daily commitment and action. Little research has been done to establish the effectiveness of a future selves intervention on behaviors that require proactive action.

Recent work in psychology demonstrates that being more connected to our "future selves" enables better long-term decision making, in part by making future rewards more salient (and making present rewards less so). To test whether a future selves intervention might facilitate patch adherence in a smoking cessation program, investigators will recruit participants planning to begin using nicotine patches in local smoking cessation programs, and randomly assign them to one of three conditions: 1) "discontinued-smoker" age-progressed future self virtual reality images vs. 2) "discontinued-smoker" + "continued smoking" age-progressed future self virtual reality images vs. 3) control - current self virtual reality images. Participants in the "discontinued smoker" age-progressed virtual reality condition will see two rendering of themselves in optimal health twenty years into the future, a frontal and profile view; participants in the "discontinued smoker" + "continued smoking" age-progressed virtual reality condition will see two frontal renderings of themselves twenty years in the future, one in optimal health and one incorporating appearance-related medical consequences of moderate-heavy smoking over twenty years (e.g., skin that is dry and discolored, increased wrinkles, etc.); participants in the current self virtual reality condition will see their present age self in a virtual reality rendering. Participants in all conditions will write a 200-300 word letter to themselves (in the treatment condition, the letter is written to their self in 20 years; in control, the letter is written to themselves in 3 months). The investigators will measure the impact of the behavioral intervention on participants' expected efficacy with smoking cessation, self-reported patch adherence, and smoking cessation success 2 and 8 weeks later.

The investigators will collect self-reported and non-invasive physiological adherence data over the course of 8 weeks on participants' adherence to the nicotine patch (self-report) and success with smoking cessation (self-report and CO analysis). For those participants self-reporting zero cigarettes smoked in the 7 day period before lab visits, investigators will administer a breath CO assessment (a simple procedure where the participant breathes into a tube and the device analyzes how many carbon dioxide parts per million are in the breath). The investigators will also asks participants if they would be willing to receive an email invitation to an online, 3-question, 6-month follow-up survey to occur four months after their last in-person visit to the laboratory.

The data collected will not be tied to identifiers; it will be used in statistical analyses assessing the effects of the intervention.