Postlunch smoking for pleasure seeking or arousal maintenance?

Interactions between smoking and eating might be expected, since the craving to smoke increases after a meal, since smokers tend to have a lower body weight and since they have also been suggested to differ from nonsmokers with respect to metabolism. Further, both eating and smoking have been reported to affect mental performance. In the first experiment the influences of a heavy meal, a light meal and no meal on smoking behavior and subjective ratings were compared in 15 subjects. Whereas puffing behavior was not affected by the meal conditions, craving and smoking enjoyment increased after the meals. In the second experiment the effects of smoking on postlunch performance and concomitant central and peripheral physiology were investigated. Postlunch smoking (compared to postlunch no smoking) distinctly showed the usual increases in heart rate, peripheral vasoconstriction and electrocortical arousal, but it failed to affect rapid information processing performance and its concomitant event-related EEG potentials as well as several indices of metabolic activity. It appears, thus, that under the conditions of the present experiments, pleasure seeking may be a more important factor in postmeal smoking than the effects on performance, EEG or metabolism.