Psychology-Addiction

• Addiction


  A state of dependency, usually a chemical substance such as cocaine, or engaging in behaviour that produces natural good feelings without substantial harm or long-term consequences
• Signs/components of addiction


  • Inability to stop behaviour despite bad consequences
  • A pattern of out of control behaviour
  • Griffiths 6 components: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflict, relapse
• Chemical addiction


  Excessive use of ingested psychoactive substances (e.g. nicotine)
• Behavioural addiction


  Excessive engagement in a particular behaviour (e.g. gambling)
• Physical dependency


  Unpleasant withdrawal symptoms in the absence of the drug
• Psychological dependency


  An individual's belief that they need the substance/behaviour to function
• Issues in researching addictive behaviour include: generalisability, social desirability bias, and lack of ecological validity due to low mundane realism
• Dopamine

  A neurotransmitter released in the brain's reward pathway, triggering a sense of pleasure
• Olds and Milner's 1934 research showed that rats would repeatedly return to an area where their brain was stimulated, as this triggered dopamine release
• Mesolimbic pathway

  The brain pathway involved in addictive behaviours and substances, where dopamine is released in the nucleus accumbens
• The reward pathway evolved in mammals as an adaptive response to behaviours that are beneficial, but in addiction this system responds to more harmful actions
• Gambling triggers dopamine release in the reward pathway
• Tolerance

  Dopamine receptors become less sensitive, leading addicts to engage more to seek the same sensation and experience withdrawal symptoms
• Frontal cortex

  Brain region linked to higher cognitive functions like decision making and memory, which can be impaired in addicts
• Cocaine addicts show abnormalities in their frontal cortex and impaired performance on tasks that usually use the frontal cortex, such as decision making
• Criticisms of early addiction research include: using different drug forms, lab studies lacking mundane realism, and inability to control confounding variables
• Drug therapy can be useful for modifying addiction, e.g. using varenicline to mimic nicotine effects
• Addiction research has been reductionist, focusing only on biology and ignoring situational factors
• Not all addictive behaviours increase dopamine levels
• The DRD2 gene variant is associated with having fewer dopamine receptors in the pleasure centre, leading addicts to overcompensate by engaging in addictive behaviours
• Variants of the ADH and ALDH genes affect how quickly the body metabolises alcohol, influencing alcoholism risk
• Diathesis-stress model

  Addiction only develops when a genetic predisposition is triggered by an environmental stressor
• Adoption and twin studies support a genetic component to addiction, but don't show 100% inevitability
• Researching and testing addiction can raise ethical issues around valid consent
• Personality traits

  Dimensions of personality that can be measured, such as extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism
• Addicts tend to score higher on psychoticism and neuroticism, and lower on extraversion, compared to controls
• Impulsivity

  A personality trait linked to both the cause and effects of drug abuse
• Impulsive individuals are less successful in addiction treatment programs
• Neuroticism is linked to using addictive behaviours to self-medicate against stress and anxiety
• The relationship between extraversion and addiction is more complex, with some studies finding little difference in extraversion scores between addicts and controls
• Correlational data on personality and addiction has limitations in establishing causation, but prospective studies support personality traits as a cause of addiction
• Cognitive biases like representativeness, availability, and hindsight bias can contribute to gambling addiction
• Cognitive biases do not fully explain addiction, as not everyone experiencing these biases becomes addicted
• Peer influence


  Different from peer pressure, involves observing role models and vicarious reinforcement
• Social learning theory

  Outlines how social factors can influence behaviour through observational learning and vicarious reinforcement
• Individuals may see their peers engaging in addictive behaviours, which can serve as role models, and those peers may be socially rewarded, leading the individual to also engage in the behaviour
• Perceived social norms about acceptable behaviours within a group can also influence addictive behaviours
• Everyone becomes addiclea - free will
• Addiction

  Social, psychological
• Peer influence

  • Peer influence is different from peer pressure
  • Peer influence is more pro-social learning theory - Bandura outlined the many ways social factors can have an effect on behaviour