, 2008; Zvolensky, Bernstein, et al., 2007; Zvolensky, Bonn-Miller, Feldner, et al., 2006). The never present findings suggest that anxiety sensitivity and early relapse effects among smokers receiving treatment for smoking cessation are not evident within a 2-week time period. Specifically, depressive symptoms, rather than anxiety sensitivity, may be a better (statistically significant) predictor of relapse in the early phases of a quit attempt. Depression-prone smokers may be more apt to become hopeless about successfully overcoming an early lapse and therefore be more likely to experience a full relapse during this same time period. Overall, the present results may suggest that anxiety sensitivity is particularly useful in terms of understanding early lapse but not necessarily early relapse.

However, because the present study involved the administration of evidence-based care strategies for smoking cessation, anxiety-sensitive smokers may have been aided by such treatment elements (e.g., learned skill-based coping strategies for avoiding relapse) that helped them recover from lapses and possibly prevented relapses. Future work could test this possibility by using a self-guided quit attempt approach (i.e., no intervention delivered) to further inform the anxiety sensitivity�Cearly relapse conjecture. Given that previous prospective work with smokers undergoing the same smoking cessation program showed that anxiety-sensitive smokers were more likely to have relapsed to smoking by a 1-month posttreatment follow-up (Mullane et al.

, 2008), the present study’s 2-week postquit date timeframe may have been too short to observe a relationship between anxiety sensitivity and relapse. It remains plausible that, given the established relationship between anxiety sensitivity and early lapse, repeated lapses over time may place anxiety-sensitive smokers at increased risk for relapse in the longer term (i.e., after the first 2 weeks of the smoking cessation attempt). Although not the primary focus of the present investigation, the study contributes to knowledge about the role of depressive and anxiety symptoms during the early phases of smoking cessation treatment. We found evidence that depressive symptoms at baseline were a significant predictor of both early lapse (at day 1) and early relapse (at days 1, 7, and 14).

These results are in accordance with past work suggesting that depressive symptoms prior to smoking cessation treatment are a reliable negative predictor of sustained abstinence and a reliable positive predictor of relapse (Burgess et al., 2002; Covey et al., 1990; Kahler et al., 2002; Zelman et al., 1992). Although Carfilzomib past work has found that anxiety disorders are associated with early relapse (Zvolensky, Gibson, et al., 2008), we found no evidence in the present investigation that anxiety symptoms prequit were related to early smoking lapse or relapse.