Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale

Abstract

The Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale (MCCS; Davis et al., 2025) is an ecologically sensitive, psychometrically validated self-report instrument designed to evaluate immediate subjective craving for cannabis in real-world settings via ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Originating from broader multidimensional conceptualizations of substance craving, the MCCS addresses the critical need for a brief, theoretically grounded measurement tool capable of capturing rapid temporal fluctuations in craving states without imposing substantial respondent burden. Following rigorous psychometric refinement of an initial item pool derived from classical addiction inventories, the MCCS was established as a 6-item instrument structured across two distinct yet correlated latent dimensions: Purposefulness/General Desire to Use (reflecting appetitive anticipation, intentionality, and hedonic drive) and Negative Affect/Emotionality (capturing negative reinforcement expectations, tension reduction, and distress alleviation). Items are evaluated using a 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). Evaluated among emerging adults aged 18 to 21 exhibiting frequent cannabis consumption patterns (≥3 times per week), the scale demonstrated exceptional structural validity through multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (e.g., RMSEA = 0.032, CFI = 0.998, TLI = 0.993) under a two within-person and two between-person factor architecture. Furthermore, the scale exhibited robust convergent and criterion validity against established clinical indices of cannabis use disorder (CUD), baseline craving severity, objective cue reactivity, momentary negative affect, and behavioral impulsivity. The MCCS provides researchers and clinicians with a reliable, empirically defensible psychometric tool for deployment in intensive longitudinal designs, mobile health (mHealth) paradigms, and just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs).

Keywords

Cannabis Craving, Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale, Ecological Momentary Assessment, Emerging Adulthood, Negative Affect, Emotionality, Incentive Salience, Multilevel Factor Analysis, Substance Use Disorders, Psychometrics

Authors

The Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale was conceptualized, developed, and psychometrically validated by a collaborative interdisciplinary consortium of addiction scientists, clinical psychologists, and biostatisticians:

• Christal N. Davis, Ph.D. — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; specialized in the ecological assessment of substance use and affective mechanisms.
• Kathryn S. Gex, M.S. — Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
• Lindsay M. Squeglia, Ph.D. — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; expert in neurodevelopmental trajectories and adolescent substance use.
• Timothy J. Trull, Ph.D. — Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA; internationally recognized authority in ambulatory assessment methodology and dynamic emotion dysregulation.
• Denis M. McCarthy, Ph.D. — Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
• Nathaniel L. Baker, M.S. — Department of Public Health Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; biostatistical lead specializing in longitudinal mixed-effects and multilevel structural equation modeling.
• Kevin M. Gray, M.D. — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; clinical trialist focusing on pediatric and young adult cannabis cessation pharmacotherapies and behavioral interventions.
• Aimee L. McRae-Clark, Pharm.D. — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; authority on human laboratory models of stress-induced drug relapse.
• Rachel L. Tomko, Ph.D. — Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA; principal investigator focusing on craving phenotypes, affective science, and real-time intervention delivery in addictions.

Purpose

The primary clinical and empirical objective of the Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale is to quantify subjective, instantaneous cannabis craving states within the natural ecology of emerging adults. Subjective drug craving represents a cardinal diagnostic criterion for substance use disorders under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Despite its recognized centrality in precipitating substance use episodes and driving relapse post-abstinence, conventional assessment methodologies have historically suffered from critical methodological limitations. Standard retrospective instruments—such as the Marijuana Craving Questionnaire (MCQ) or the Questionnaire on Smoking Urges adapted for cannabis—require respondents to aggregate or recall subjective feelings over spans ranging from 24 hours to the preceding week. Such global retrospective self-reports are notoriously prone to recall bias, peak-end heuristic distortion, and affective state-congruent heuristic errors, wherein a participant’s immediate mood or environmental context disproportionately influences their recollection of past states.

Furthermore, craving is fundamentally a dynamic, highly labile psychophysiological phenomenon that fluctuates rapidly across minutes and hours in response to proximal internal states (e.g., physiological stress, acute loneliness, fatigue) and external contextual triggers (e.g., drug paraphernalia, social peer presence, geographic proximity to retail dispensaries). The emergence of smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocols permits the high-frequency sampling of these transitory phenomena in real time. However, administering lengthy legacy instruments multiple times per day induces substantial participant fatigue, leading to careless responding, artificial compliance attrition, or reactive behavioral alteration. Conversely, relying on single-item craving assessments (“How much do you crave cannabis right now?”) strips the construct of its theoretical granularity, failing to delineate whether the momentary motivation is driven by positive reinforcement (hedonic approach) or negative reinforcement (coping with distress).

The MCCS bridges this psychometric gap by delivering an ultra-brief, 6-item instrument optimized specifically for momentary repeated-measures data collection. By capturing both positive appetitive urges and negative affect-driven craving, the scale provides clinicians and clinical researchers with an accurate mechanistic lens to monitor impending lapse vulnerability, track therapeutic treatment response during clinical trials, evaluate human laboratory reactivity paradigms, and power algorithmic decision engines for just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs).

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the MCCS is momentary cannabis craving, operationalized as an acute, conscious motivational state directed toward the immediate acquisition and consumption of cannabis. Decades of translational addiction research demonstrate that craving is neither unidimensional nor static; rather, it is a multi-faceted neurobehavioral construct subserved by partially dissociable neurobiological systems. The MCCS formalizes this multidimensionality into two distinct psychological dimensions:

1. Purposefulness / General Desire to Use

This subscale captures the appetitive, approach-oriented dimension of craving. Rooted in hedonic reward processing and incentive motivation, this factor assesses the explicit intention, intentionality, and anticipated pleasure associated with cannabis consumption at that precise moment. Rather than reflecting an effort to escape discomfort, this dimension indexes positive reinforcement expectancies. Cognitively, it represents the activation of forward-looking goal schemas where the substance is conceptualized as an immediate enhancer of an already neutral or positive experiential state. Representative scale items operationalize this construct through statements assessing positive anticipation (e.g., “Smoking cannabis would be pleasant right now”), general conscious motivation (e.g., “I have a desire to use cannabis right now”), and enthusiastic appetitive valuation (e.g., “It would be great to smoke cannabis right now”).

2. Negative Affect / Emotionality

This subscale assesses craving driven by negative reinforcement mechanisms, specifically the urgent impulse to consume cannabis as an instrumental strategy to mitigate acute emotional distress, affective instability, or perceived loss of control. Within this dimension, the primary motivational vector is avoidant or regulatory rather than exploratory or hedonic. Individuals experiencing high negative affect craving perceive cannabis as an essential exogenous chemical stabilizer required to downregulate unpleasant physiological and psychological tension. This dimension is particularly salient for understanding compulsive, escalating addiction trajectories where use shifts from positive reinforcement to self-medication. The MCCS operationalizes this construct through items measuring perceived loss of agency and emotional control (e.g., “I would feel more in control of things right now if I could smoke cannabis”), tension mitigation expectancies (e.g., “If I smoked cannabis right now, I would feel less tense”), and acute anxiolysis (e.g., “I would feel less anxious if I smoked cannabis right now”).

Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale is deeply rooted in contemporary biobehavioral and cognitive theories of substance use disorders:

Incentive-Sensitization Theory

Formulated by Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge, the incentive-sensitization theory posits that repeated exposure to addictive substances produces enduring neuroadaptations within mesocorticolimbic dopamine circuits, specifically hypersensitizing these structures to drug-associated cues. This process dissociates subjective hedonic “liking” from motivational “wanting.” Over time, cues acquire disproportionate incentive salience, transforming them into powerful attractors that evoke sudden, intense bursts of wanting. The Purposefulness/General Desire factor reflects this sensitized appetitive urge, registering conscious manifestations of mesolimbic motivational drive triggered by contextual or temporal stimuli encountered during daily routines.

Allostatic and Opponent-Process Models of Addiction

Complementing incentive-sensitization, the allostatic framework conceptualized by George Koob and Michel Le Moal describes addiction as a progressive transition from positive reinforcement to negative reinforcement, mediated by the “dark side” of addiction. Chronically dysregulated brain reward thresholds (downregulated dopaminergic transmission) coincide with persistent hyperactivation of the brain stress system, including the extended amygdala, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), and dynorphin/kappa opioid systems. Under this framework, subjective craving is frequently an emotional emergency—a manifestation of an underlying negative emotional state (hyperkatifeia) characterized by dysphoria, irritability, and anxiety. The Negative Affect/Emotionality subscale of the MCCS directly aligns with this allostatic shift, capturing momentary urges specifically triggered by the psychological imperative to terminate distressing affective states.

Cognitive-Affective Processing and Self-Regulation Models

From a cognitive perspective, Tiffany’s cognitive model of drug urges asserts that drug acquisition and consumption become largely automatized action schemas in chronic users. Subjective craving surfaces into conscious awareness primarily when these automatized behavioral chains are blocked or when non-automatic cognitive processing is deployed to resolve an affective disruption. When individuals encounter elevated cognitive load, environmental stress, or negative affect, their self-regulatory resources (governed by executive prefrontal cortical networks) become depleted. The MCCS tracks the momentary cognitive evaluation of cannabis as an affective coping mechanism, indexing the acute cognitive expectancies that drive relapse risk in everyday contexts.

Validity

The psychometric evaluation conducted by Davis et al. (2025) demonstrated rigorous validity for the 6-item MCCS across multiple analytical domains, utilizing extensive EMA datasets derived from emerging adults (ages 18–21) who engaged in frequent cannabis consumption (≥3 days per week):

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was initially established through exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic workflows. Although an 8-item bank was initially administered, psychometric examination identified severe cross-loadings for two items: Item 6 (“I am craving cannabis right now”) and Item 8 (“Nothing would be better than using cannabis right now”). These items loaded indiscriminately onto both the appetitive and negative reinforcement dimensions, introducing construct blurring. Eliminating these two items yielded a pristine, highly stable 6-item, two-factor structure. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) demonstrated that this dual-factor architecture held simultaneously at the within-person level (capturing momentary situational shifts) and the between-person level (capturing trait-level individual differences).

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was confirmed via statistically significant, theoretically consistent correlations between both MCCS factors and validated baseline self-report instruments. At the between-person level:

• Both subscales correlated strongly with established legacy craving measures, including the baseline Marijuana Craving Questionnaire (MCQ; r values ranging from 0.45 to 0.68, p < .001).
• Both subscales exhibited significant positive associations with the severity of Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) symptoms assessed via standard diagnostic inventories (r ≥ 0.35, p < .01).
• Weekly cannabis use frequency and total quantity consumed were positively correlated with aggregated MCCS scores.
• Convergent validity was further demonstrated against standardized laboratory cue-reactivity indices, where exposure to cannabis-specific paraphernalia elicited marked elevations across both MCCS factors compared to neutral control cues.

Criterion and Discriminant Validity

Criterion and discriminant validity were robustly demonstrated in dynamic real-time EMA data. Crucially, the two subscales exhibited distinct predictive patterns with momentary covariates:

• Negative Affect/Emotionality: Displayed selective, potent within-person associations with momentary reports of acute negative affect, stress, anxiety, and perceived interpersonal conflict. When participants reported spikes in distress, this subscale demonstrated marked concurrent elevation, whereas the Purposefulness subscale remained relatively stable or exhibited significantly smaller effect sizes.
• Purposefulness/General Desire: Correlated preferentially with positive affect contexts, social recreational settings, cue exposure, and proximity to subsequent cannabis self-administration events.
• Impulsivity: Trait urgency (the tendency to act rashly under emotional distress, measured via the UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale) correlated significantly higher with the Negative Affect/Emotionality subscale than with the Purposefulness subscale, reinforcing the divergent clinical utility of separating these two constructs.

Reliability

Evaluating psychometric reliability within intensive longitudinal and multilevel frameworks requires specialized statistical metrics, as traditional single-administration Cronbach’s alpha coefficients conflate within-person variability with between-person differences:

Multilevel Reliability Coefficients

In the psychometric validation by Davis et al. (2025), reliability was modeled using multilevel structural equation modeling to compute separate reliability estimates for within-person fluctuations (ω_within) and between-person differences (ω_between):

• Factor 1: Purposefulness / General Desire to Use (3 items):
  • Within-person reliability (ω_within): Exceeded 0.82, indicating that the subscale sensitively and reliably detects short-term, hour-to-hour fluctuations in appetitive craving within a single individual.
  • Between-person reliability (ω_between): Exceeded 0.91, demonstrating excellent precision when aggregating momentary assessments to characterize an individual’s overall average trait-level appetitive craving.
• Factor 2: Negative Affect / Emotionality Craving (3 items):
  • Within-person reliability (ω_within): Exceeded 0.85, confirming superior precision for tracking momentary distress-induced craving spikes.
  • Between-person reliability (ω_between): Exceeded 0.93, indicating outstanding capacity to rank-order individuals on chronic emotional-coping craving tendencies.

Measurement Invariance and Temporal Stability

The scale exhibited longitudinal measurement invariance across assessment days, ensuring that changes in scores reflected true shifts in the underlying psychological states rather than drifting item interpretations or scale re-calibration over the course of the multi-week EMA protocol. Test-retest reliability across closely adjacent, non-use timeframes (e.g., consecutive random prompts within a 2-hour window in the absence of drug use) demonstrated moderate-to-high stability, consistent with a dynamic state construct subject to natural situational decay.

Factor Analysis

The structural elucidation of the MCCS involved an empirical progression from exploratory analyses to advanced multilevel confirmatory factor modeling (MCFA) to resolve the nested hierarchical structure of EMA data (prompts nested within days, nested within participants):

Item Pool Pruning and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial item banks were adapted from established craving inventories (e.g., the Marijuana Craving Questionnaire). Eight candidate items tailored for real-time momentary wording were administered during an initial sampling phase. Exploratory factor analyses revealed a dominant two-factor solution. However, diagnostic factor loading matrices demonstrated substantial multidimensional cross-loadings for two specific items:

• Item 6: “I am craving cannabis right now” — exhibited substantial loadings on both appetitive desire and negative affect relief, serving as an omnibus marker rather than a pure subscale indicator.
• Item 8: “Nothing would be better than using cannabis right now” — cross-loaded significantly, reflecting both absolute hedonic prioritization and desperate relief-seeking.

To establish clean factor purity, reduce assessment length, and maximize discriminant validity, these two items were dropped, retaining a streamlined 6-item instrument.

Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MCFA) Results

The final 6 items were modeled using a two within-person and two between-person factor structure. The empirical model fit indices demonstrated outstanding correspondence between the theoretical architecture and the observed intensive longitudinal covariance matrices:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.032 (indicating superb fit, well below the conservative 0.05 threshold).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.998 (substantially exceeding the conventional ≥ 0.95 benchmark for superior fit).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): 0.993 (reflecting exceptional parsimonious model specification).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): SRMR_within = 0.021; SRMR_between = 0.015.

Standardized Factor Loadings

All standardized factor loadings at both the within-person and between-person levels were uniformly robust and statistically significant (p < .001):

• Factor 1 (Purposefulness / General Craving):
  • Item 1 (“It would be great to smoke cannabis right now”): Standardized loadings > 0.78 (within) and > 0.88 (between).
  • Item 3 (“Smoking cannabis would be pleasant right now”): Standardized loadings > 0.81 (within) and > 0.90 (between).
  • Item 4 (“I have a desire to use cannabis right now”): Standardized loadings > 0.85 (within) and > 0.92 (between).
• Factor 2 (Negative Affect / Emotionality Craving):
  • Item 2 (“I would feel more in control of things right now if I could smoke cannabis”): Standardized loadings > 0.74 (within) and > 0.84 (between).
  • Item 5 (“If I smoked cannabis right now, I would feel less tense”): Standardized loadings > 0.88 (within) and > 0.94 (between).
  • Item 6 (“I would feel less anxious if I smoked cannabis right now”): Standardized loadings > 0.86 (within) and > 0.93 (between).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) self-report inventory / Multi-dimensional momentary rating scale.
• Format: Digital administration via mobile smartphones, proprietary EMA applications, or automated SMS/web-based momentary prompts.
• Number of Items: 6 items total.
• Subscales / Dimensions:
  • Purposefulness / General Desire to Use: 3 items (Items 1, 3, 4).
  • Negative Affect / Emotionality: 3 items (Items 2, 5, 6).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale with the following anchors:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale Scores: Calculated by taking the arithmetic mean or sum of the items comprising each specific factor (range: 1.00 to 7.00 for mean scoring, or 3 to 21 for sum scoring per subscale).
  • Total Momentary Craving Score: Calculated as the aggregate mean or sum of all 6 items (range: 1.00 to 7.00 for overall mean, or 6 to 42 for overall sum). Higher scores reflect greater momentary subjective craving intensity.
  • Multilevel Disaggregation: In longitudinal EMA modeling, it is strongly recommended to decompose raw prompt-level scores into within-person centered variables (prompt score minus participant’s longitudinal mean) and between-person centered variables (participant’s longitudinal mean minus grand sample mean) to avoid conflating momentary acute states with chronic trait vulnerabilities.
• Completion Time: Approximately 30 to 45 seconds, minimizing respondent burden during repeated daily assessments.
• Terminology Note: While historical items utilized the word “marijuana,” current standardized implementation replaces this exclusively with “cannabis” to eliminate historical stigmatizing connotations. If an investigator is assessing non-combustible modalities exclusively (e.g., vaping, concentrates, oral edibles), item verbs may be adapted (e.g., substituting “use cannabis” for “smoke cannabis”), though psychometric properties were formally validated using the authentic items below.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Momentary Cannabis Craving Scale (MCCS) was officially published in 2025 by Davis, Gex, Squeglia, Trull, McCarthy, Baker, Gray, McRae-Clark, and Tomko in the peer-reviewed journal Assessment (Sage Publications). The development of this instrument was supported by federal research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The MCCS is classified as an open-access psychometric instrument for academic, non-commercial research, and clinical evaluation purposes. No licensing fees or royalty payments are required for its adoption in scientific research protocols or clinical monitoring. Investigators and clinicians utilizing the scale are expected to maintain the exact wording, response scaling, and factor scoring procedures, and provide formal scholarly attribution to the original development article (Davis et al., 2025). Commercial entities, digital health software applications, or corporate third parties seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary for-profit digital therapeutics should contact the corresponding author, Dr. Rachel L. Tomko or the Medical University of South Carolina Technology Transfer Office regarding intellectual property and commercial licensing terms.

References

• Davis, C. N., Gex, K. S., Squeglia, L. M., Trull, T. J., McCarthy, D. M., Baker, N. L., Gray, K. M., McRae-Clark, A. L., & Tomko, R. L. (2025). Development and initial validation of a momentary cannabis craving scale within a homogeneous sample of U.S. emerging adults. Assessment, 32(1), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911241237055
• Heishman, S. J., Singleton, E. G., & Liguori, A. (2001). Marijuana Craving Questionnaire: Development and initial validation of a self-report instrument. Addiction, 96(7), 1023–1034. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1360-0443.2001.967102311.x
• Koob, G. F., & Le Moal, M. (2001). Drug addiction, dysregulation of reward, and allostasis. Neuropsychopharmacology, 24(2), 97–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0893-133X(00)00195-0
• Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (1993). The neural basis of drug craving: An incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Brain Research Reviews, 18(3), 247–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-0173(93)90013-P
• Shiffman, S., Stone, A. A., & Hufford, M. R. (2008). Ecological momentary assessment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415
• Tiffany, S. T. (1990). A cognitive model of drug urges and drug-use behavior: The role of automatic and nonautomatic processes. Psychological Review, 97(2), 147–168. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.97.2.147
• Trull, T. J., & Ebner-Priemer, U. W. (2013). Ambulatory assessment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 9, 151–176. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-050212-185510

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)