The Executive Function Of Heroin Abstainers:the Effects Of Heroin-Related Cues And Negative Emotional Priming

The dual-process model of addictive behaviors emphasizes that drug use or relapse is modulated by two semi-independent systems:the "impulsive" system and the’"reflective" system. Current researches focus on one of the two systems seperately. So far, little the research has been done to investigate the dynamic interaction between the two systems as most researchers have studied them in a dissociative manner, which may hinder the comprehensive understanding about the addictive behaviors. Given typical characteristics of heroin abuse, we recruited a group of heroin abstainers as target participants in an attempt to clarify the dynamical interaction between the "impulsive" and the "reflective" system. The present study combined a serious of classical cognitive tasks with a cue-exposure paradigm, to examine participants’dynamic characteristics of executive function when presented heroin-related or negative-emotional eventscues. This study made contribution in integrating to link the two systems, so that the understanding of the drug use or relapse behavoirs can be promoted, and the new invention of the clinical treatments can be motivated.Via six separate experiments, the present study systematically investigated the impacts of both the exposure to drug-related cues and the exposure to negative-emotional cues on the different aspects of the executive function such as inhibition, shift and update in heroin abstainers. The main findings are as below:(1) the response and interference inhibition are both impaired after exposure to heroin-related cues in heroin abstainers;(2) the task shifting function is impaired after exposure to heroin-related cues in heroin abstainers;(3) the updating process of working memory is weakened after exposure to heroin-related cues in heroin abstainers;(4) the response and interference inhibition are both impaired after exposure to negative-emotional cues in heroin abstainers; (5) the shift function is impaired after exposure to negative-emotional cues in heroin abstainers;(6) the updating process of working memory is weakened after exposure to negative-emotional cues in heroin abstainers.