Cognitive biases toward alcohol-related words and executive deficits in polysubstance abusers with alcoholism

Alcoholism; Cognitive biases; Drugs; Inhibition; Relapse; Shifting; Adult; Aged; Alcohol Drinking; Cognition; Female; Humans; Inhibition (Psychology); Male; Middle Aged; Reaction Time; Substance-Related Disorders; Temperance; Word Association Tests

Abstract :

[en] Aim: To study cognitive biases for alcohol-related cues on executive function tasks involving mental flexibility and response inhibition in polysubstance abusers with alcoholism. Design: The responses to alcohol-related cues of detoxified polysubstance abusers with alcoholism and of non-addicts were compared. Setting: The University of Iowa City, Iowa, USA. Participants: Thirty detoxified polysubstance abusers with alcoholism (PSA) and 30 healthy non-substance abusers (CONT). Measurements: Using the Alcohol Shifting Task', a variant of the go/no-go paradigm, we measured the response times and the accuracy of responses to targets and distracters. Sometimes the alcohol-related words were the targets for the 'go' response, with neutral words as distracters, sometimes the reverse. Several shifts in the type of the target occurred during the task. Findings: Relative to CONT, PSA were generally slower to respond to targets, but the group difference was smaller when alcohol-related words were the targets. A signal detection analysis also indicated that relative to CONT, the PSA had more difficulties discriminating between targets and distracters (low d′)- and they showed more signs of decision bias (low C), reflecting increased readiness to respond to both targets and distracters. However, these discrimination and inhibition deficits were more pronounced when alcohol-related words were the targets. Furthermore, the weaknesses in RT and C were more pronounced in PSA after shifting the targets from alcohol-related to neutral words, or vice versa. Conclusions: These results suggest that PSA have cognitive biases towards information related to alcohol, and that these biases, as well as the poor executive functions (lower mental flexibility and response inhibition) revealed in PSA might be responsible for their failure to maintain abstinence. © 2005 Society for the Study of Addiction.

Disciplines :

Neurosciences & behavior

Author, co-author :

Noël, Xavier; Clinic of Addictions, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium, Clinic of Addictions, Salle 72, CHU Brugmann, 4, place Van Gebuchten, 1020 Bruxelles, Belgium

Van der Linden, Martial ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie > Département de Psychologie

D'Acremont, Mathieu; Child and Adolescent Psychology Unit, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Colmant, Maud; Clinic of Addictions, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium

Hanak, Catherine; Clinic of Addictions, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium

Pelc, Isidore; Clinic of Addictions, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium

Verbanck, Paul; Clinic of Addictions, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium

Bechara, Antoine; Department of Neurology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States

Language :

English

Title :

Cognitive biases toward alcohol-related words and executive deficits in polysubstance abusers with alcoholism

Publication date :

2005

Journal title :

Addiction

ISSN :

0965-2140

eISSN :

1360-0443

Publisher :

Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom

Volume :

100

Issue :

Pages :

1302-1309

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 29 December 2019

Statistics

Number of views

24 (0 by ULiège)

Number of downloads

0 (0 by ULiège)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenCitations

Bibliography

American Psychiatric Association (APA) (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn. Washington, DC: APA.
American Psychological Association (APA) (2001) Publication Manual. Washington, DC: APA.
Bechara, A., Dolan, S., Denburg, N., Hindes, A., Anderson, S. W. & Nathan, P. E. (2001) Decision-making deficits, linked to a dysfunctional ventromedial prefrontal cortex, revealed in alcohol and stimulant abusers. Neuropsychologia, 39, 376-389.
Beck, A. T. (1987) Beck Depression Inventory. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
Beck, A. T. & Steer, R. A. (1993) Psychometric properties of the Beck Depression Inventory, twenty-five years of evaluation. Clinical Psychology Review, 8, 77-100.
Burgess, P. W. & Shallice, T. (1996) Response suppression, initiation and strategy use following frontal lobe lesions. Neuropsychologia, 34, 263-272.
Cohen, J. (1988) Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioural Sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cohen, J. (1994) The earth is round (P < 0.05). American Psychologist, 49, 997-1003.
Collette, F. & Van Der Linden, M. (2002) Brain imaging of the central executive component of working memory. Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, 26, 105-125.
Cox, W. M., Hogan, L. M., Kristian, M. R. & Race, J. H. (2002) Alcohol attentional bias as a predictor of alcohol abusers' treatment outcome. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 68, 237-243.
Fellows, L. K. & Farah, M. J. (2003) Ventromedial frontal cortex mediates affective shifting in humans: evidence from a reversal learning paradigm. Brain, 126, 1830-1837.
Field, M., Mogg, K. & Bradley, B. P. (2004) Eye movements to smoking-related cues: effects of nicotine deprivation. Psychopharmacology, 173, 116-123.
Field, M., Mogg, K., Zetteler, J. & Bradley, B. P. (2004) Attention biases for alcohol cues in heavy and light social drinkers: the roles of initial orienting and maintained attention. Psychopharmacology, 176, 88-93.
Franken, I. H. A. (2003) Drug craving and addiction: integration psychological and neuropsychopharmacological approaches. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 27, 563-579.
Goldstein, R. Z., Leskovjan, A. C., Hoff, A. L., Hitzemann, R., Bashan, F., Khalsa, S. S. et al. (2004) Severity of neuropsychological impairment in cocaine and alcohol addiction: association with metabolism in the prefrontal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 42, 1447-1458.
Goldstein, R. Z. & Volkow, N. D. (2002) Drug addiction and its underlying neurobiological basis: neuroimaging evidence for the involvement of the frontal cortex. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 1642-1652.
Guardia, J., Caso, C., Arias, F., Gual, A., Sanahuja, J., Ramirez, M. et al. (2002) Double-blind, placebo-controlled study of naltrexone in the treatment of alcohol-dependence disorder: results from a multicenter clinical trial. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 26, 1381-1387.
Hildebrandt, H., Brokate, B., Eling, P. & Lanz, M. (2004) Response shifting and inhibition, but not working memory, are impaired after long-term heavy alcohol consumption. Neuropsychology, 18, 203-211.
Hofland, K. & Johansson, S. (1982) Word Frequencies in British and American English. Bergen: The Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, NAVE
Johnsen, B. H., Laberg, J. C., Cox, W. M., Vaksdal, A. & Hugdahl, K. (1994) Alcoholic subjects' attentional bias in the processing of alcohol-related words. Psychology of Addictive Behaviour, 8, 111-115.
Jones, B. T., Jones, B. C., Smith, H. & Copley, N. (2003) A flicker paradigm for inducing change blindness reveals alcohol and cannabis information processing biases in social users. Addiction, 98, 235-244.
Lubman, D. I., Yücel, M. & Pantelis, C. (2004) Addiction, a condition of compulsive behaviour? Neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence of inhibitory dysregulation. Addition, 99, 1491-1502.
Lusher, J., Chandler, C. & Ball, D. (2004) Alcohol dependence and the alcohol Stroop paradigm: evidence and issues. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 75, 225-231.
May, J., Andrade, J., Panabokke, N. & Kavanagh, D. (2004) Images of desire: cognitive models of craving. Memory, 12, 447-461.
Mazas, C., Finn, P. R. & Steinmetz, J. E. (2000) Decision making biases, antisocial personality, and early-onset alcoholism. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 24, 1036-1040.
Moselhy, H. F., Georgiou, G. & Kahn, A. (2001) Frontal lobe changes in alcoholism: a review of the literature. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 16, 357-368.
Murphy, F. C., Sahakian, B. J., Rubinsztein, J. S. et al. (1999) Emotional bias and inhibitory control processes in mania and depression. Psychological Medicine, 29, 1307-1321.
Nigg, J. T. (2000) On inhibition/disinhibition in developmental psychopathology: views from cognitive and personality psychology and a working inhibition taxonomy. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 220-246.
Noël, X., Sferrazza, R., Van der Linden, M., Paternot, J., Verhas, M., Hanak, C. et al. (2002) Contribution of frontal cerebral blood flow measured by (99m) Tc-Bicisate spect and executive function deficits to predicting treatment outcome in alcohol-dependent patients. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 37, 347-354.
Noël, X., Van der Linden, M., Schmidt, N., Sferrazza, R., Hanak, C., Le Bon, O. et al. (2001) Supervisory Attentional System in non-amnesic male alcoholic subjects. Archives of General Psychiatry, 58, 1152-1158.
Parsons, O. A. (1998) Neurocognitive deficits in alcoholics and social drinkers: a continuum? Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 22, 954-961.
Robinson, T. E. & Berridge, K. (2003) Addiction. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 25-53.
Rosnow, R. & Rosenthal, R. (2003) Effect sizes for experimenting psychologists. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57, 221-237.
Schmidt, F. (1996) Statistical significance testing and cumulative knowledge in psychology: implications for training of researchers. Psychological Methods, 1, 115-129.
Schweinsburg, A. D., Paulus, M. P., Barlett, V. C., Killeen, L. A., Caldwell, L. C., Pulido, C. et al. (2004) An FMRI study of response inhibition in youths with a family history of alcoholism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1021, 391-394.
Shallice, T. & Burgess, P. (1998) The domain of supervisory processes and temporal organization of behaviour. In: Roberts, A. C., Robbins, T. W. & Weiskrantz, L., eds. The Prefrontal Cortex: Executive and Cognitive Functions, pp. 22-35. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sharma, D., Albery, I. P. & Cook, C. (2001) Selective attentional bias to alcohol-related stimuli in problem drinkers and non-problem drinkers. Addiction, 96, 629-633.
Snodgrass, J. & Corwin, J. (1988) Pragmatics of measuring recognition memory: applications to dementia and amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 117, 34-50.
Stetter, F., Ackermann, K., Bizer, A., Straube, E. R. & Mann, K. (1995) Effects of disease-related cues in alcoholic inpatients: results of a controlled Alcohol Stroop' study. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 19, 285-295.
TEDS (2002) Treatment Episode Data Sci (TEDS): 1992-2000. National Admissions to Substance Abuse Treatment Services, DASIS Series: S-17, DHHS Publication No. (SMA) 02-3727, Rockville, MD: SAMHSA. http://wwwdasis.samhsa. gov/teds00/teds_rpt_2000_web.pdf [accessed 11 May 2005]
Tiffany, S. T. (1990) A cognitive model of drug urges and drug-use behaviour: role of automatic and nonautomatic processes. Psychological Review, 97, 147-168.
Townshend, J. M. & Duka, T. (2001) Attentional bias associated with alcohol cues: differences between heavy and occasional social drinkers. Psychopharmacology, 157, 67-74.
Wilkinson, L. (1999) Statistical methods in psychology journals. American Psychologist, 54, 594-604.