A dual‐process exploration of binge drinking: Evidence through behavioral and electrophysiological findings

Abstract

The dual-process model, describing addictive disorders as resulting from an imbalance between increased automatic approach behaviors towards the substance and reduced abilities to control these behaviors, constitutes a sound theoretical framework to understand alcohol-use disorders. The present study aimed at exploring this imbalance at behavioral and cerebral levels in binge drinking, a pattern of excessive alcohol consumption frequently observed in youth, by assessing both reflective control abilities and automatic processing of alcohol-related stimuli.For this purpose, 25 binge drinkers and 25 comparison participants performed a Go/No-Go task during electrophysiological recording. Inhibition abilities were investigated during explicit (ie, distinguishing alcoholic versus nonalcoholic drinks) and implicit (ie, distinguishing sparkling versus nonsparkling drinks, independently of their alcohol content) processing of beverage cues. Binge drinkers presented poorer inhibition for the explicit processing of beverage cues, as well as reduced N200 amplitude for the specific processing of alcohol-related stimuli. As a whole, these findings indicated inhibition impairments in binge drinkers, particularly for alcohol cues processing and at the attentional stage of the cognitive stream. In line with the dual-process model, these results support that binge drinking is already characterized by an underactivation of the reflective system combined with an overactivation of the automatic system. Results also underlined the influence of explicit processing compared with implicit ones. At the clinical level, our findings reinforce the need to develop intervention methods focusing on the inhibition of approach behaviors towards alcohol-related stimuli.

Electrophysiological Correlates of an Alcohol-Cued Go/NoGo Task: A Dual-Process Approach to Binge Drinking in University Students

“…In early perceptual components, the scarce findings range from subtle correlations (as in our research) to larger [52,53] or smaller [82] P1 amplitudes. Regarding later cognitive ERP components, larger N2-NoGo amplitudes in response to nonalcohol stimuli (as we observed) may reflect compensatory conflict monitoring processes that overcome bias to an alcohol preponderant context; however, such compensatory mechanisms may be overcome by a longer history of consumption (or more difficult task), as reflected by lower N2-NoGo or poorer behavioural execution reported in other studies [45,49]. The same seems to occur with the P3-NoGo component, as larger amplitudes were reported in a longitudinal research [55] only during the second evaluation.…”

“…Task design may also explain the absence of N2-NoGo differences in a letter Go/NoGo task with pictures of alcoholic beverages and neutral pictures as a background [48]. The fact that alcohol pictures were not explicitly related to task instructions may have led to the lack of differences, as shown by Lannoy et al [49] in a study in which group differences in N2-NoGo amplitudes and behavioural performance only emerged when Al pictures were explicitly related to the task instructions. Furthermore, in contrast to the compensatory hypothesis, the aforementioned research found smaller N2-NoGo amplitudes for Al pictures in BDs (relative to CNs), suggesting that BDs may experience some difficulties at the attentional level in inhibiting a prepotent response when alcohol pictures are present.…”

“…Furthermore, reduced N2 amplitudes were found in BDs in a beverage Go/NoGo task when a response to alcohol pictures had to be withheld, relative to the neutral condition. These alterations did not emerge when task instructions switched to Go/NoGo sparkling vs. non-sparkling beverage pictures [49]. In contrast, in subjects with low sensitivity to alcohol (with a pattern of consumption similar to BDs) who completed an alcohol cued Go/NoGo task, N2 and P3 amplitudes were larger during low probability NoGo trials cued by an alcohol-related image [50].…”

“…Some of the research described above did not find group differences in behavioural task performance, while others did observe such differences [46,48]. BDs showed increased N2 ERPs amplitudes or fMRI activations, although some studies found no differences [48] or a decrease on this ERP component [49]. The need for further investigation is a commonly highlighted request in all of the studies reviewed.…”

Temporally dynamic neural correlates of drug cue reactivity, response inhibition, and methamphetamine-related response inhibition in people with methamphetamine use disorder

“…Two central aspects of methamphetamine use disorder are a characteristic reactivity to drug cues (itself involving attentional bias towards drug cues, their increased salience, and ultimately the induction of craving) 11 , 12 , and failures of executive control and response inhibition 13 . These phenomena widely figure in models of a substance use disorder, such as the “impaired response inhibition and salience attribution” model 14 and dual-process models, which comprise automatic approach behavior towards substances and reduced abilities to inhibit these behaviors 15 . An increasing number of task-based fMRI studies in MUD have investigated the neural correlates of either methamphetamine cue-reactivity, using conventional cue exposure tasks 16 – 19 or cognitive control and response inhibition, using varieties of Stroop, Stop Signal or Go-NoGo tasks 20 – 22 , but an approach with greater ecological validity has been to assess response inhibition concurrently with cue-reactivity.…”