Does Alcohol Cue Inhibitory Control Training Survive a Context Shift
2020
Inhibitory control training (ICT) is a novel psychological intervention that aims to improve inhibitory
control in response to alcohol-related cues through associative learning. Laboratory studies have
demonstrated reductions in alcohol consumption following ICT compared with control/sham training, but
it is unclear if these effects are robust to a change of context. In a preregistered study, we examined
whether the effects of ICT would survive a context shift from a neutral context to a seminaturalistic bar
setting. In a mixed design, 60 heavy drinkers (40 female) were randomly allocated to receive either ICT
or control/sham training in a neutral laboratory over 2 sessions. We developed a novel variation of ICT
that used multiple stop signals to establish direct stimulus–stop associations. The effects of ICT/control
were measured once in the same context and once following a shift to a novel (alcohol-related) context.
Our dependent variables were ad libitum alcohol consumption following training, change in inhibitory
control processes, and change in alcohol value. ICT did not reduce alcohol consumption in either context
compared with the control group. Furthermore, we demonstrated no effects of ICT on inhibitory control
processes or alcohol value. Bayesian analyses demonstrated overall support for the null hypotheses. This
study failed to find any effects of ICT on alcohol consumption or candidate psychological mechanisms.
These findings illustrate the difficulty in training alcohol-inhibition associations and add to a growing
body of literature suggesting that ICT holds little evidential value as a psychological intervention for
alcohol use disorders.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI