Delay Discounting Validity and E-Cigarette Use: A Comparison in E-Cigarette Users, Combustible Cigarette Users, Dual Users, and Nonusers

Delay discounting refers to the devaluation of an outcome as temporal delay increases. Steep discounting is characterized by preferring a smaller, immediate outcome over a larger, delayed outcome and is associated with maladaptive behaviors such as tobacco use. Previous studies have compared delay discounting outcomes between combustible cigarette (CC) smokers and nonusers using various discounting tasks. With the growing use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes [EC]) and various delay discounting tasks available to researchers, we extended previous work in delay discounting and EC use in two ways. The present study assessed delay discounting in a web-based sample of 259 participants to (a) establish convergent validity across four different delay discounting tasks and (b) compare the outcomes between four subgroups: dual users, exclusive EC users, exclusive CC users, and nonusers. The four delay discounting tasks (Monetary Choice Questionnaire, 5-Trial Adjusting Delay Discounting Task [ADT-5], Temporal Discounting Questionnaire, and Brief Intertemporal Choice Task [BRIC Task]) showed moderate to strong convergent validity (p < .001). Further, findings indicated significant differences between all four subgroups across the four different delay discounting tasks (p < .048) with small effect sizes. Pairwise comparisons showed that exclusive EC users exhibited significantly steeper discounting than nonusers in ADT-5 (p = .043) and BRIC Task (p = .029) and dual users exhibited significantly steeper discounting than nonusers on ADT-5 (p = .043) and BRIC Task (p = .030). Our findings replicate previous findings and suggest the potential role of delay discounting in explaining the behavioral mechanism underlying e-cigarette use.