University of Florida Department of Psychology
Project Title: Psychological Flexibility and Cigarette Smoking: Smoking Status Comparisons and Ecological Momentary Assessment in a Digital Behavioral Treatment
Hailey Donohue is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the University of Florida working under the supervision of Dr. Jesse Dallery in the Behavioral Health and Technology (BHaT) Research Clinic. Hailey’s current research focuses on technology-based interventions to promote health behavior, specifically contingency management (CM) for cigarette smoking cessation. She has been awarded the 2026 Innovative Student Research Grant to support her ongoing dissertation work, which aims to further our understanding of behavioral mechanisms underlying smoking cessation interventions.
Smoking remains one of the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. One of the most promising approaches for addressing this gap is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) delivered via mobile health (mHealth) platforms. Yet critical gaps remain in our understanding of how ACT promotes smoking cessation. Hailey’s project includes two studies to investigate ACT processes in relation to cigarette smoking.
The first study is a cross-sectional assessment of psychological flexibility in adults who currently smoke cigarettes every day, some days, formerly smoked, and have never smoked. Characterizing psychological flexibility across smoking status will establish clinically meaningful levels of ACT mechanisms and strengthen the theoretical foundation for mechanismbased mHealth interventions. The second study is a longitudinal, single-case evaluation of the proposed mediators of a novel mHealth intervention, iCanQuit+Motiv8, that integrates ACTbased content (iCanQuit) and CM (Motiv8). Hailey’s project will use ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine time-ordered relationships between psychological processes and smoking behavior, representing an innovative approach to investigating potential mechanisms of ACT-based smoking cessation interventions.
Completion of these aims will advance mechanism-based intervention science by clarifying the role of psychological flexibility in cigarette smoking and testing whether core ACT mechanisms function as temporally antecedent mechanisms of behavior change. This project will inform the optimization of scalable, theory-driven treatments for smoking cessation by identifying active mechanisms of change.
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