Train alcoholism away

Participants are allocated to one of the training varieties, either focussing on an attentional bias or on an approach bias or to a placebo-training. Prior research has shown that these biases are related to addictive behaviors, including alcohol dependence.

The different forms of training consist of computer tasks in which alcohol related en neutral stimuli are presented, to which participants have to respond. In the attentional training the participant learns to steer their attention away from the alcoholic stimuli, and during the automatic approach training or action tendency training (ATT), participants learn to push alcohol away (training an avoidance response instead of an approach response). In one of the varieties of the action tendency training, the participant is instructed to respond to the relevant features of the presented stimuli (push alcohol pictures away), in the other varieties and in the placebo-control condition they are instructed to respond to an irrelevant feature of the presented pictures (for example; pull all the pictures presented in landscape format toward you, and push all pictures presented in portrait format away). The automatic tendency from the participants to approach alcohol will be influenced during these trainings sessions by presenting (almost) all alcohol related pictures in the format which is pushed away, and (almost) all soda pictures in the format which is pulled. In the control condition the push/pull ratio for alcohol and softdrink pictures is set at 50%.

Main hypothesis of this study is that re-training of an attentional bias for alcohol, decreases the attentional bias for alcoholic stimuli, and that a re-training the automatic approach bias for alcoholic stimuli decreases this cognitive bias.
Further, this study will investigate whether the effects of each training are specific for each bias, or if the training of attentional bias will also effect the approach bias and vice versa. Finally, we will also study the effects of both varieties of training on several clinically relevant variables, such as relapse, craving and motivation to change drinking behaviour.

Direct post-training; + 1 month; + 3 months

Different varieties of "re-training" of attentional bias for alcohol or of automatic approach tendencies for alcohol