Welcome to the latest research roundup from the Addiction
Research Group based in the Department of Psychological
Sciences, University of Liverpool. Summer has come and gone, but don’t let
it dampen your spirits because here is our quarterly feast of science for your
enjoyment!
Top billing goes to Inge Kersbergen and Matt Field who
published a paper in Psychology
of Addictive Behaviours examining the validity of different measures of
automatic alcohol action tendencies. The
aim of this study was to compare different tasks that measure automatic
alcohol-approach biases on their ability to predict individual differences in
drinking behaviour. The results demonstrated that only the tasks in which participants had
to respond to the pictures based on their content (alcohol or control) rather
than an irrelevant feature (picture orientation) were significant predictors of
drinking behaviour. On the relevant-feature tasks, faster approach responses to
alcohol pictures were related to higher levels of risky drinking and alcohol
consumption. This study was the first to compare these different types of
tasks and it has important implications for the development of approach bias
modification training in clinical populations.
A second paper, by Eric Robinson and colleagues
published in Appetite
set out to examine how a laboratory environment influences how much food people
eat. In particular, we wanted to know whether people eat less when they believe
that a researcher is going to record and monitor their food consumption. We
sampled a group of young females and found that participants ate less food when
they felt as though their behaviour was being monitored. We think this study
raises an important question about how we should study eating behaviour.
Although getting participants into a lab can help us to control external
influences and observe exactly what they do, this might come at the cost of
affecting and changing the very behaviour we are trying to study. We will be
following this study up over the next few months and should have more answers
soon!
Samantha Baker (a clinical psychology trainee),
Joanne Dickson and Matt Field published a paper in BMC Psychology examining
whether implicit priming of approach or avoidance motivational orientations
influenced the opposing orientation. In
a group of non-dependent drinkers subliminal word primes were presented during trials
of visual probe and stimulus-response compatibility tasks. These primes were alcohol-appetitive (e.g
Party), alcohol-aversive (e.g. nausea) or neutral (e.g. bookshelf). Contrary to expectations, we found no effects
of masked priming of motivational orientations on attentional bias for alcohol
cues, or on automatic approach and avoidance tendencies evoked by those cues. These
results tentatively suggest that automatic alcohol cognitions cannot be
influenced by subliminal priming.
Matt Field, Andy Jones, and Abi Rose contributed to
a series of experiments published in Behaviour Research and
Therapy that identified an important role for propositional knowledge in
responses to drug cues, including Pavlovian to Instrumental transfer effects
(these effects were covered in an earlier
blog).
Finally, we published our first ever study protocol
in BMC Public Health,
describing the procedure and analysis plans for an ongoing controlled trial on
web-based inhibition training for problem drinkers. This study is the first to
examine repeated inhibition-training for the reduction of problem drinking in
community samples. We believe that publishing these protocols is important as
it encourages transparency when reporting results from large scale research
studies.
We have been on our travels again, disseminating our
research around the UK (and beyond)!
Andy and Matt travelled to Stirling in May, for an ESRC
workshop aimed at increasing the richness and frequency of social science
survey data. Andy discussed the use of smartphones to administer cognitive
tasks.
A whole gang of PhD students and early career
researchers travelled to Leeds in June for an early career event organised by
the UK
Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies (UKCTAS). This was followed by a
Public Health Research Centres of Excellence Conference, in which both Inge
Kersbergen and Eric Robinson gave presentations on their research conducted at
Liverpool.
We also attended the British
Association for Psychopharmacology meeting and a satellite symposium
organised by the International Society for Research on Impulsivity in Cambridge in
June. At the meeting Andy Jones received the Junior
BAP/Cambridge Cognition award for his research. Well done to him!
Matt Field gave a keynote lecture at the British
Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapy entitled ‘Cognitive
processes in addiction: new directions and clinical implications’. Together
with Frank Ryan (Imperial College London), he also ran a pre-conference workshop
for therapists on ‘Thinking the way out of addiction’.
Finally, Matt and Andy attended
the 5th Thematic Meeting on Addiction in Utrecht, Netherlands. Matt
discussed the Effects of inhibition training on alcohol intake in problem
drinkers.
We have contributed articles for
the Mental Elf about cytisine
and varenicline for smoking cessation, internet-based
drug prevention, and mobile
apps for recovering alcoholics. Natasha Clarke has also written some
excellent blogs spanning world cup alcohol advertising
to ‘nudge’
interventions.
There have also been some comings and goings in our
research group.
Three new PhD students have joined our group: Graeme
Knibb, Panos Spanakis and Mrunal Bandawar. Finally, we say goodbye and good
luck to Elly McGrath who left her research position with us to begin her PhD at
Manchester.
That’s all we have. Thanks for reading. As always,
if you would like to get in touch about anything featured here please contact Prof. Matt Field, and if you are interested
in taking part in our research please contact Andy
Jones
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