Addiction - Cognitive Approach Flashcards
Maintenance of gambling - irrational beliefs
Cognitive distortions or irrational beliefs play a role.
They belief they can win even though it is not likely
GAMBLERS FALLACY, ILLUSIONS OF CONTROL
exaggerated self confidence, luck is skill
Initiation of gambling model
Individuals intentionally use pathological behaviour to treat the psychological symptoms from which they suffer. It is not selected at random, but is perceived as helping with a particular problem.
Gambling may help with the depression associated with poverty.
It needs to only be judged as making things better
Gambling relapse - recall bias
A tendency to remember and overestimate wins while forgetting about, underestimating or rationalising losses (blanco et al)
A string of losses does not act as a disincentive
Motivated by a believe that they deserve to win
Initiation of smoking - expectation theory
Costs and benefits
Bad mood
Good mood
Brandon et al - expectations about the costs and benefits of the activity
Kassel et al - teenagers smoke when they feel bad mood
Brandon and baker - smoking should decrease the intensity of the bad mood
Mermelstein et al - expectancy of positive moods
Maintenance of smoking - automatic processing
Unconscious
Control
Somatic effects
Brandon et al - as addiction develops it is influenced more by unconscious expectancies
Loss of control explained
Tate et al - told smokers they should not have any bad experiences when stopping, lead to fewer somatic effects than the control group
Smoking relapse - assessing costs and benefits
Expectations can affect readiness.
Devries and Backbier - Perceptions affect quitting behaviour
Those who think quitting has no benefits are most likely to relapse
GRIFFITHS FRUIT MACHINE GAMBLING
30 each of regular gamblers and non regular gamblers
Regular believed selves to be more skilful and made irrational verbalisations, treated the machine as a person ‘near misses’
Justified continuation
Research support for gambling
‘Self medicating’
Li et al - self medication model support
Those who gambled to escape reality of life were more likely to have other substance abuse tendencies
Less likely to commit crime to finance behaviour
Also substitute means to satisfy their goal
Cause and effect?
Depression and gambling
Some forms of psychological distress must precede drug use .
Becona et al - Major depressive disorder is present in the majority of pathological gamblers
Equally possible that depression is a consequence of the financial loss etc
Research support for the relationship between expectancies and relapse
Inconsistent findings about nicotine patch treatment
Moolchan et al - patches could increase cessation rates and reduce relapse but only when accompanied by cognitive behavioural therapy to remove positive expectancies of smoking behaviour
Importance of expectancies smoking -> NRT
Juliana and Brandon - smokers positive expectancies of smoking appeared to generalise to NRT which may explain its modest success rate for stopping smoking.
Implications for treatment - different treatment for different reasons
More than one original motivation so there should be differing approaches to helping their treatment depending on the motivation
Self medicating gamblers - treat underlying mood problem before making them quit gambling
Cognitive therapy attempts correct irrational beliefs, which reduces the motivation to gamble
How addicts describe their own behaviour
Davies - addicts describe thir behaviour differently depending who they are talking to
Health workers/police vs peers and friends
Out of control // rational and understandable preferences
Personal language may act as an absolve of responsibility
Expectancy theories and publication bias
Negative research results not getting attention
Unrepresentive view
Particularly when number of studies published is small
