Lecture 4 Flashcards
Which factors influence the probability that effortful reflective processes will override automatic intuitive processes?
Situational/contextual factors, priming/instructions, cognitive abilities, the individual’s tendencies to employ both thinking processes
Which factors influence the probability that effortful reflective processes will NOT override automatic intuitive processes?
Time pressure, information overload, emotional content, exhaustion, alcohol/drugs consumption, stress, sleep depravation.
Give examples of societal problems that can be explained based on the suboptimal interaction between system 1 and system 2.
Stereotype knowledge, weapon bias, prejudice.
What is stereotype knowledge?
It refers to generalised information about a group of people that is often activated automatically. Hence, rejection of this knowledge requires effortful S2 processes.
What does Beck’s cognitive model of depression state?
Internalising problems:
It states that biassed acquisition and processing of information has a primary role in the development and maintenance of depression. It is influenced by activation in the limbic system and failure of the frontal regions to effectively regulate activities in the limbic regions.
What is addiction?
Externalising problems:
Conflict between compulsions and longer-term interests are crucial in addiction. Compulsion to take drugs often overwhelms the intention and desire to improve health and life circumstances.
What is the link between the Dual Process Framework and addiction?
In addiction there is an imbalance due to a dysfunctional reflective system, which has lost its ability to process and trigger somatic signals associated with future prospects and a hyperactive impulsive system, which exaggerates the somatic signals from immediate prospects.
What properties can drugs acquire in those struggling with addiction?
They can trigger bottom-up, involuntary signals, through the amygdala, that modulate, bias, or even hijack top-down goal-driven attentional resources needed for the normal operation of the reflective system.
What is the CNDS model’s (Competing neurobehavioural decision systems) account on addiction?
Addiction results from a reinforcer pathology, which involves excessive valuation of brief, intense reinforcers (due to a hyperactive impulsive system) and excessive discounting of delayed compared to immediate reinforcers (due to a hypoactive executive decision system). It can be measured and described by the interaction between valuation of reinforcers and the rate of delay discounting (=devaluation of reward with delay).
What does the triadic, neurocognitive theory of addiction state?
It integrates a third system that is related to the interoceptive processes, the insula. It promotes addictive behaviours by translating interoceptiveness into subjective feelings of desire, anticipation, urge or craving. Hence, its activation exacerbates S1 and hijacks the cognitive resources needed for S2.
What do the opponent-process and pleasure-withdrawal theories argue?
They place an emphasis on the euphoria of taking drugs, or the opposite need to hedonically self-medicate the unpleasantness of withdrawal or other life issues. Furthermore, drugs are first taken to gain peer approval and this behaviour is maintained by the pleasant experiences (positive reinforcement). Over time, unpleasant withdrawal experiences and other issues influence addicts to take drugs, to reduce the unpleasantness of those experiences (negative reinforcement).
What do the S-R habit and reinforcement theories state?
They emphasise the repetition and automaticity of drugs use, which, because of basic stimulus-response learning, produce drug-use routines performed without reflection. Hence, the choices underlying these activities shift from being goal-driven to being compulsive. It involves transition from prefrontal to striatal control over drug-seeking and drug-taking.
What do the incentive-sensitisation theories argue?
They emphasise the excessive intensity of addictive cravings (‘wanting’) in those who remain vulnerable to relapse, even after withdrawal ends, as a result of long-term drug-induced sensitisation in the mesocorticolimbic brain-reward circuitry. Hence, ‘wanting’ systems become hyperactive to drug cues and contexts. The more intense incentive salience on those cues or contexts, the more addicts have a stronger cue-triggered urges. Hence, what becomes compulsive is not drug use, but craving, which, in turn, increasingly motivates use.
What cognitive biases are involved in the development and maintenance of addiction?
Attentional bias refers to a greater allocation of attention to substance or substance-related cues. Experiment: After 5 training sessions the subjects had the ability to disengage from alcohol-related cues.
Automatic action tendencies (approach bias) relates the extent to which there is a stronger approach response to substance-related cues. Experiment: After four sessions of approach bias retraining (pushing away a joystick in response to alcohol pictures), subjects’ approach bias changed into an avoidance bias.
Memory biases refer to the extent to which mental constructs become associated with substances. Experiment: After pairing alcohol with negative pictures, there were more negative evaluations of alcohol and reduced drinking compared with a control condition in which alcohol pictures were paired with neutral pictures.
What are the interventions to decrease the control of the impulsive decision system?
Cognitive bias modification is aimed at changing disorder specific maladaptive cognitive motivational biases.
TMS allows for a selective inhibition of targeted brain regions. If the mPFC or nucleus accumbens are targeted, then the hyperactivity is reduced.
