Emotional and non-emotional pathways to impulsive behavior and addiction

Abstract

Impulsivity is tightly linked to addiction. However, there are several pathways by means of which impulsive individuals are more prone to become addicts, or to suffer an addiction more intensely and for a longer period. One of those pathways involves an inadequate appraisal or regulation of positive and negative emotions, leading to lack of control over hazardous behaviors, and inappropriate decisions. In the present work, we assessed cocaine-dependent individuals (CDI; n = 20), pathological gamblers (PG; n = 21), and healthy controls (HC; n = 23) in trait impulsivity measures (UPPS-P model's dimensions), and decision-making tasks (Go/No-go; delay-discounting task). During the Go/No-go task, electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded, and Go/No-go stimuli-evoked potentials (ERP) were extracted. Theory-driven ERP analyses focused on the No-go > Go difference in the N2 ERP. Our results show that negative urgency is one of the several psychological features that distinguish addicts from HC. Nevertheless, among the dimensions of trait impulsivity, negative urgency is unique at independently covarying with gambling over-pathologization in the PG sample. Cocaine-dependent individuals performed more poorly than gamblers in the Go/No-go task, and showed abnormal Go/No-go stimuli-evoked potentials. The difference between the No-go stimulus-evoked N2, and the Go one was attenuated by severity and intensity of chronic cocaine use. Emotional dimensions of impulsivity, however, did not influence Go/No-go performance.

The Value of Nothing: Asymmetric Attention to Opportunity Costs Drives Intertemporal Decision Making

“…The choice items presented in Studies 2-5 were subsets of the 42 depicted in Table 3. In Study 2, we used the 27 choice items devised by Kirby et al (1999), and which have been widely used in studies of delay-discounting (e.g., Chabris et al 2008, Luo et al 2011, Myerson et al 2014, Scholten et al 2014, Torres et al 2013. These "Kirby" items (presented in the bottom half of Table 3) involve larger payoffs than the "Magen" items (top half of Table 3) and were originally developed to test the magnitude effect-the tendency for patience to increase as both the SS and LL payoffs are increased by a common multiplicative constant.…”

Trait urgency and gambling problems in young people by age: The mediating role of decision-making processes

“…However, this could be 13 examined in future studies. In addition, gambling problems were more common among young adults who attend the first-years of college and university (18-21 years old) than adolescent and young adults (22)(23)(24)(25). According to Stone and colleagues (2012), moving out of the parental home and attending college may be related to increased gambling problems.…”

El papel de la impulsividad motora en el ajuste socioemocional de niños de alto riesgo y de controles sanos de 7 años de edad: Un estudio de seguimiento.

“…Not only false alarms (f) but also hit rates (h) are directly correlated with socioemotional disturbances, and, most importantly, both correlations are in the same direction. To put it in simple words, socioemotional disturbances seem to be associated to a 'worse' performance in terms of false alarms, but to a 'better' performance in terms of hits (see Perales et al, 2009;and Torres et al, 2013, for similar patterns of results in adults).…”

“…The difficulties of people with impulsive or inappropriate behavior probably originate at the level of decision-making and affect all decisions, not only those to be made in the presence of No-go stimuli, which explain why impulsive people actually show slower decisions than controls (Torres et al, 2013). Disinhibition then results from an attempt by the individual to reach an acceptable level of hits and shorter latencies, by lowering the level of non-selective control over response releasing.…”