A Dynamic Study Of Heroin Abstinents' Attentional Bias In Different Healing Phases

There are several theoretical models concerning drug addiction process presently. Among them, the incentive-sensitization model is the most integrative. According to this model, sensitization has important influence on neural cognitive function of drug addicts. Owing to the forming of sensitization, the neutral stimuli become salient incentives and it is able to grab overage attention of addicts, which is shown by intense craving for drug. Recently, the construction of the concept of attentional bias has provided an available tool for revealing cognitive mechanism of addiction, and offered an objective behavioral index for evaluating the role of drug craving. The present study measured heroin abstinents' attentional bias for heroin-related cues in different healing phases to explore the attentional function and its change tendency of heroin addicts in abstinence phase, and discussed the probability that attentional bias served as the index of healing effect of heroin abstinents.Two experiments were carried out in this study. In the first experiment, we explored the heroin abstinents' attentional bias and its change tendency for neutral words, heroin-related positive and negative words in different healing phases by the emotional Stroop pattern, In the second experiment, we used neutral words, heroin-related positive and negative words as the attentional cues to explore the heroin abstinents' attentional bias and its change tendency by the Probe Detection pattern. The following conclusions could be drawn from our experiments:1. Attentional bias, the difficulty of shifting of attention in space and time for heroin-related words occurred to heroin abstinents.2. hi the emotional Stroop pattern, heroin abstinents' attentional bias tended to be gradually better, their heroin craving descended and heroin avoiding enhanced in the total healing period, but the improvement is not significant.3. In the Probe Detection pattern, heroin abstinents' function of shifting of attention in time for valid cues and that of shifting of attention in space for invalid cues improved significantly in the total healing period.4. In the Probe Detection pattern, the index of reaction time to the space probe signal was not sensitive to the improvement of participants' function of shifting of attention in space in different healing phases, but the quantity of inhibition of return was the effective index to asses the improvement of participants' function of shifting of attention in space in different healing phases.