Anxiety Sensitivity and Smoking Behavior Among Trauma-Exposed Daily Smokers: The Explanatory Role of Smoking-Related Avoidance and Inflexibility

Work suggests anxiety sensitivity (AS) plays an important role in understanding the smoking-trauma association. AS is thought to serve as a transdiagnostic risk factor in both smoking and trauma, resulting in poorer outcomes in both domains. Cognitive inflexibility reflects a lack of ability to disengage attention from one task to another. In relation to smoking, a decrease in smoking-specific avoidance and inflexibility is associated with increased likelihood of smoking abstinence after treatment. Our aim was to examine whether smoking-specific avoidance and inflexibility explains the relation of AS and smoking severity among trauma-exposed smokers. It was hypothesized AS would have a significant indirect effect within this relation. The findings show empirical evidence of the explanatory effect of smoking-specific avoidance and inflexibility in the relation between AS and smoking severity among trauma-exposed smokers. This relation impacted number of cigarettes per day, years of being a daily smoker, number of failed quit attempts, and even heaviness of smoking index.