A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Relationship Between Attentional Bias and Subjective Craving in Substance Abuse

By Matt Field, Marcus Munafò, Ingmar H. A. Franken. Psychological bulletin, 2009

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theoretical models of addiction suggest that attentional bias for substance-related cues should be associated with self-reported craving. The authors evaluated the strength of the association by performing a meta-analysis on 68 independent data sets from which correlation coefficients between subjective craving and attentional bias indices were derived. Additional stratified analyses were conducted to identify any variables that might moderate the association between craving and attentional bias. The primary meta-analysis indicated a significant, albeit weak (r = .19), association between attentional bias and craving. Stratified analyses revealed that the association was larger for illicit drug and caffeine craving than for alcohol and tobacco craving, larger for direct measures of attention (eye movement measures and event-related potential measures) than for indirect behavioral measures of attentional bias, and larger when craving strength was high than when it was low (all ps < .05). The size of the correlation did not differ among patients in treatment and individuals who were not seeking treatment. These results suggest that attentional bias and craving are related phenomena, although the relationship is generally modest and appears to be moderated by various factors. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f33086d4e769545cc0d41e43f10ce1c97d88130

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In Applied Psychology

J. B. Rodell

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Finding Meaning through Volunteering: Why Do Employees Volunteer and What Does It Mean for Their Jobs? (2013, background): “In an inductive study of employee volunteers, Geroy et al. (2000) concluded that, after meaningfulness, the primary reasons that employees volunteered were to gain skills that could be used at work and to make contacts that could be used at work.”
Sensory Imagery in Craving: From Cognitive Psychology to New Treatments for Addiction (2012, background): “…permanent changes in reward sensitivity in addiction (Franken, 2003) and evidence that attentional biases explain relatively little of the variance in craving between individuals (Field et al, 2009), trials on the modification of attentional bias have been encouraging (e.g. Fadardi & Cox, 2009).”
Temporal Dynamics of Attentional Bias (2015, background): “Accordingly, they are expected to smoke less frequently in their daily lives (Baker et al., 2004; Field et al., 2009).”
Integrating psychological and neurobiological considerations regarding the development and maintenance of specific Internet-use disorders: An Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model. (2016, unknown): “Attentional biases Attentional biases and their relationships with craving responses have been studied in substance addictions (e.g., Christiansen et al., 2015; Field and Cox, 2008; Field et al., 2009).”
Individualized prediction of heroin cue-induced craving using task-based EEG functional connectivity (2026, unknown): “Given the rapid onset of cue-induced reactivity,whichtypicallyoccurswithinhundredsofmilliseconds,thehigh temporalresolutionofEEGmakesitparticularlysuitedforinvestigating cue-inducedcraving 7,8 .”