Research Roundup Summer 14

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 5^th 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

Research Roundup Spring 2014

Welcome to the latest research roundup from the Addiction Research Group based in the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool. As ever, we have been working hard over the past few months on many different research topics, and in this blog post we have condensed some of our recent publications and activities into bite-size portions for your enjoyment. 

The first two publications reported investigations of how our drinking behaviour is influenced by that of other people.

A study conducted in our bar lab was published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. We examined how social acquaintances influence each other’s alcohol consumption using a confederate design. A pair of social drinkers was invited to the laboratory, and one of them (the confederate) was secretly informed to choose either alcoholic or soft drinks when offered them by the experimenter. Both individuals were subsequently offered drinks to consume while they played a game together (the popular ‘4 pics 1 word’ game). The key variable of interest was the amount of alcohol that the naïve participant chose to consume. We found that naïve participants were strongly influenced by their acquaintance’s choice: if the confederate chose alcoholic drinks, the naïve participant was much more likely to choose them as well. Furthermore, the majority of participants believed that their drinking was not influenced by their partner’s choices. This study was the first to use the confederate design in individuals who knew each other before the study, and it has important implications for the psychological mechanisms that underlie effects of imitation on drinking behaviour. The study was conducted by Rebecca Dallas, an undergraduate psychology student who is first author on the paper. The paper was the topic of a press release and it was covered by several print and online media outlets, including the Metro and science website RedOrbit.  The research was also covered by some other unexpected news sources, including ‘RealBollywood’, which surprised and excited us (mostly the former).  

The second paper, by Eric Robinson and colleagues, was published in Substance Use and Misuse. This Internet study investigated if there is an association between perceived drinking norms and usual drinking behaviour in UK students.  We also included interventions to correct misperceptions about the drinking behaviour of others, and increase intentions to drink responsibly. We found that peer drinking was associated with individual differences in drinking: individuals who believed other students drank responsibly also drank responsibly. However, interventions based on accurate norm messages did not influence intentions to drink responsibly, possibly because they were not seen as credible. This study adds to a growing literature suggesting that social norm interventions may have limited efficacy in reducing hazardous drinking in UK students.  

Speaking of bite-size portions, we have diversified from only studying alcohol. We recently published two papers that examined the motivation to obtain and consume chocolate and pizza. 

The first paper by Charlotte Hardman and colleagues was published in Appetite. This research continued previous work by our group (see here and here) examining whether the anticipation of receiving a reward, in this case delicious cheese and tomato pizza, would influence physiological (salivation) and attentional responses in hungry participants. Whilst there was no evidence for any effects of anticipation on salivation, we demonstrated that anticipation influenced initial attentional processing of pizza pictures. While this result wasn’t quite as clear cut as our previous studies with beer and chocolate, it does suggest that anticipation of reward plays a role in attentional bias for rewarding cues.  

Our second snack-themed paper was published by Jessica Werthmann, Matt Field and colleagues in Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. In this study we examined whether manipulating attention towards or away from chocolate using a modified anti-saccade task could influence craving and consumption of chocolate. We found that participants who shifted attention towards chocolate cues subsequently ate more chocolate during an ad-libitum taste test compared to those shifted their attention away from chocolate.  These findings suggest that training attentional bias away from food-cues can reduce consumption of that food, although in other papers we have been sceptical about the clinical applications of ‘attentional bias modification’, particularly in addiction.

Last but no means least, Jasna Martinovic and colleagues published a paper in PLoS One (we support open access!). In this study we examined electrophysiological correlates of Pavlovian-to-Instrumental transfer (PIT) in individuals who regularly drink beer and eat chocolate. PIT is the phenomenon whereby drug-cues evoke an anticipation of drug reward and thereby increase instrumental responding for drug reward. The brain mechanisms that underlie PIT effects are poorly understood and this was the focus of this study. We examined whether electrophysiological indices of the motivational salience of beer and chocolate pictures (the P300 and Slow Potential) would be associated with behavioural PIT responses for beer and chocolate rewards. We found clear behavioural PIT effects and some indication of increased Slow Potentials in response to the beer and chocolate pictures, but unfortunately these were not related to each other. Possibly, behavioural PIT effects are generated by subcortical structures that cannot be detected using EEG, or maybe we just didn’t use the right method. 

As well as writing papers we also like to get out and see the world, all in the name of science of course...

Inge Kersbergen, Jay Duckworth and Natasha Clarke attended Alcohol Research UK’s first postgraduate and early career symposium in London in March. Natasha and Inge both gave oral presentations. Inge presented her own study, ‘Visual attention to health information on alcoholic drinks containers’ which was an eye-tracking study examining responses to warning labels on alcohol drinks containers, and Natasha presented the paper, ‘Alcohol-induced risk taking on the BART mediates alcohol priming’ which we discussed in a previous roundup. 

Matt Field discussed the role of attentional bias in addiction at the ‘Maastricht symposium on the role of attentional bias in psychopathology’, in March. After the conference, our former (temporary) colleague Jessica Werthmann successfully defended her PhD thesis, for which we offer our congratulations!!

That is all for this research roundup. Thank you 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

Research Roundup Winter 2014

Welcome to the latest research round up from the Addiction Research Group based in the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool. We have been working very hard over the winter months (because typing keeps hands warm in badly heated offices), and this is what we have produced…

We have published three review papers covering a broad range of topics in addiction. 

The first by Pawel Jedras and colleagues, published in Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics (open access) examined the role of drug anticipation in addiction and reward. They examined the available evidence, discussing the necessary role of drug expectancy in conditioned responses to drug-related cues, the role of impulsivity and the underlying neural circuitry of anticipation. Finally, they provided a discussion of how perceived drug availability can lead to poor treatment responses and what might be done to mitigate this. 

Our second review was by Margot Peeters (who visited us from the Netherlands) with Matt Field. They conducted a narrative review, published in Alcohol and Alcoholism, summarising the evidence base for cognitive impairments in heavy drinking adolescents, with an emphasis on elucidating any causal relationship(s). They examined both cognitive impairments and impulsivity as risk factors for alcohol use in youth, but also the possibility that heavy drinking may cause further cognitive impairments and impulsiveness due to neurotoxic effects on the brain. 

Our final review paper was by Andy Jones and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry (open access). The aim of this review was to identify the psychological and environmental variables that may cause state changes in (dis)inhibition leading to increases in drinking and drug use. Some of these variables include stress, self-control depletion and exposure to cues. They concluded that identifying these variables and targeting them for treatments may help reduce the risk of heavy drinking, drug use and relapse. 

We have also published some interesting original research:

Paul Christiansen published a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence demonstrating that individualised stimuli may increase the predictive validity of attentional bias tasks. Using a Stroop task containing words related to the individual’s favourite drink, they found performance predicted variance in drinking above and beyond performance on a Stroop using general alcohol words. This paper was a direct follow up to a commentary Paul and Matt published in 2012. 

Abi Rose and colleagues published a paper in Psychopharmacology, investigating the relationship between alcohol-induced risk taking using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and urge to drink. They found that alcohol increased risk taking and urge to drink. Furthermore, it was found that risk taking after alcohol consumption mediated alcohol priming, suggesting that those susceptible to alcohol-induced risk taking may be more likely to drink excessively, due to an increased urge to drink.

In other news, we have been travelling around the country to disseminate our research. 

The addiction group is a core member of the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies (UKCTAS), a leading centre of tobacco and alcohol research and policy excellence. The inaugural meeting of UKCTAS in York in September was attended by Matt Field, Abi Rose, Eric Robinson, Jay Duckworth, Lisa Di Lemma and Inge Kersbergen.

Matt Field attended the Society for the Study of Addiction conference in York in November and gave an invited talk on the contributions of basic science to our understanding of addiction.

Andy Jones, Eric Robinson and Matt Field also attended the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine (UKSBM) in Oxford in December.  Andy gave a poster and short oral presentation discussing ‘Response Inhibition in everyday life. Validating a mobile version of the Stop-Signal Task’. Eric gave an oral presentation entitled ‘GPs don't know what obesity looks like and this reduces their likelihood of initiating treatment’. Congratulations to Eric, who was awarded a prestigious early career award at UKSBM.

We also attended the North West Alcohol Conference, at the Hilton hotel in Liverpool in November. Jay, Inge and Natasha did an excellent job of summarising the conference highlights here

Finally, Matt is working as an advisor for Alcohol Concern’s Dry January campaign. If you are taking the challenge yourself and finding it a bit of a struggle, you can log on to the Facebook page or follow the Twitter feed for advice, details here

That is a wrap for this research roundup. Thank you 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.

Research roundup summer 2013

This is the Summer 2013 research roundup from the Addiction Research Group based in the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool. We have been hard at work throughout the ‘heatwave’ and (more typical) downpours of our British summer.  The fruits of our labours can be seen below...

Top spot goes to Gordon Fernie (a former post-doc) and colleagues who published a study in Addiction (Open Access) which looked at bidirectional relationships between three measures of behavioural impulsivity (delay discounting, risk-taking, and disinhibition) and alcohol involvement among adolescents. They measured impulsivity and alcohol involvement in 287 adolescents at five time points over the course of two years. The results show that individual differences in performance on three measures of behavioural impulsivity each predicted alcohol involvement six months later. However, alcohol involvement did not predict subsequent impulsivity. This study is the first to show that those three measures of impulsivity predict alcohol involvement after fairly short follow-up periods of six months. This press release generated a bit of media coverage, some of which can be seen here.

Andy Jones worked with Andrej Stancak on a study that was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, examining electrophysiological markers of response conflict during disinhibition and their relationship with alcohol consumption.  They demonstrated that when individuals performed a stop signal task (a measure of inhibitory control), the magnitude of the P300 component of the event-related potential during inhibition was inversely correlated with increased alcohol consumption during a subsequent laboratory taste test. This suggests that better inhibition (as inferred from brain activity during a task that requires inhibitory control) is associated with reduced consumption of alcohol.  This was the first study to directly examine the relationship between electrophysiological markers of inhibitory control, and alcohol-seeking.

Matt Field organised and edited a special issue on Addiction for The Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. The issue covered some of the current 'hot topics' in addictive behaviours including social influences, negative affect, motivated attention, implicit cognitive processes and disinhibition. Our research group contributed two papers for the special issue. We collaborated with colleagues from the Netherlands on a paper examining motivated attention (again using electrophysiological measures) in alcohol-dependent patients seeking treatment. Andy Jones and other colleagues at Liverpool also published a research paper that explored the effects of alcohol-related cues and contexts on disinhibited behaviour, a study that was conducted in our Bar Lab.

We contributed two review papers for a forthcoming special issue of CNS Spectrums. The first discusses the clinical relevance of attentional bias in substance use disorders and the second discusses pharmacological modulation of these biases. Staying on the topic of attentional bias, Matt Field wrote a critical commentary of a paper published in the journal European Addiction Research. You can find this, and other commentaries here. 

In other news…

We are delighted to welcome Dr Charlotte Hardman to our research group. An appetite and obesity researcher by trade, Charlotte has been working closely with the addiction group on projects related to food addiction and attentional bias to rewarding cues.

The addiction research group has expanded... for the summer at least! We are pleased to welcome a group of summer students who are working on research projects in addiction and motivated behaviour:

Marianne Erskine-Shaw, under the supervision of Abi Rose is working on a project examining alcohol intoxication and attentional bias. Her studentship was funded by the British Psychological Society. Jade Scott is working with Charlotte Hardman on attentional bias to food and alcohol cues, and Rebecca Dallas is working with Eric Robinson on a project examining the effects of peer influences on drinking behaviours in our Bar Lab. Both Jade and Rebecca are funded by the School of Psychology, University of Liverpool. 

Our research group played a (small) part in a successful application for funding from the National Institute for Health Research, details here. The broad aim of the funding is to investigate how to improve mental health care, and our group will be looking at interventions to reduce problem drinking. 

Paul Christiansen also received a grant from Alcohol Research UK to investigate beliefs about the acute effects of alcohol on impaired control over drinking, both in the laboratory and normal day-to day life. More on this later....

Finally, we have been getting out and about to disseminate our research! Matt Field, Pawel Jedras, Andy Jones and Paul Christiansen all attended the British Association for Psychopharmacology summer meeting in Harrogate. Pawel, Andy and Paul all gave a poster presentation on some of their current projects. Pawel also gave a short oral presentation in a symposium on reward and choice.  You can spot us talking shop in some pictures from the conference at the BAP’s facebook page. Some of Abi Rose's data was presented at the World Congress of World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (WCBCT) meeting in Lima, Peru in July. Slightly more exotic than Harrogate. 

That's it! If you are based in Liverpool and are interested in taking part in some of our research, you can email Andy Jones for information about studies that are running at the moment.