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Addiction has been described as the pathological usurpation of the neural mechanisms normally involved in emotional processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) can provide a non-invasive index of neural responses associated with the processing of emotionally relevant stimuli and serve as a tool for examining temporal and spatial commonalities between the processing of intrinsically motivating stimuli and drug cues. Before beginning a smoking cessation program, 116 smokers participated in a laboratory session in which dense-array ERPs (129 sensors) were recorded during the presentation of pictures with emotional (pleasant and unpleasant), neutral and cigarette-related content. ERP differences among categories were analyzed with use of randomization tests on time regions of interest identified by temporal principal component analysis. Both emotional and cigarette-related pictures prompted significantly more positivity than did neutral pictures over central, parietal, and frontal sites in the 452-508 ms time window. During the 212-316 ms time window, both pleasant and cigarette-related pictures prompted less positivity than neutral images did. Cigarette-related pictures enhanced the amplitude of the P1 component (136-144 ms) above the levels measured in the emotional and neutral conditions. These results support the hypothesis that for smokers, cigarette-related cues are motivationally relevant stimuli that capture attentional resources early during visual processing and engage brain circuits normally involved in the processing of intrinsically emotional stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Identifying addicts with higher risk of relapse would provide the opportunity to implement individualized interventions and increase cessation success rates. Unfortunately, the ability to predict the long-term success of drug cessation treatments continues to elude researchers. We tested whether brain responses to emotional and cigarette-related pictures were predictive of the ability to abstain from smoking. Smokers interested in quitting ( n = 180) participated in a smoking cessation clinical trial. Before the initiation of any treatment, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by emotional (both pleasant and unpleasant), neutral, and cigarette-related images. Cluster analysis was used to assign smokers to two groups based on the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) to the experimental stimuli. While both groups showed enhanced responses to cigarette-related cues, one group ( n = 81) also showed blunted brain responses to intrinsically pleasant stimuli. Smokers in the latter group were significantly less likely to be abstinent at 10, 12 and 24 weeks after their quit date. In conclusion, using ERPs, a direct measure of brain activity, we found that smokers with blunted brain responses to intrinsically pleasant stimuli had lower rates of long-term smoking abstinence. This response offers a new biomarker for identifying smokers at higher risk of relapse and for testing the efficacy of new interventions aimed at normalizing brain reward systems' responses to intrinsically pleasant stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]