Study On The Recognition Of Heroin Addicting Abstainers

The drag abuse in China mainly concerns with heroin. In recent years, the illegal heroin abuse has become a serious social problem. Drag, which affects people both neurotically and psychologically, causes great desires for people. After detoxification, people's physiological functions could get recover in a large; whereas to eliminate the psychological reliance on drag is pretty difficult. Largely because of the high toxicity of heroin, of the non-ideality of drag abstinence, of the high frequency of re-taking, and of the psychological desire for drug, the abstainers pick up drug taking again and again. Therefore, the study of the cognitive processes of the heroin addicts provides the experimental evidence and theoretical basis for the study of how to effectively employ the psychological techniques to help the addicts successfully abstain from drag addiction, from the harms caused by drag.In the cognitive processes, attention is closely related with all sorts of individual cognitive functions, and is the controller of mental activities. Under the three states of attention(attention of the drag material, attention of the neutral material and null attention),the recognition study of the abstaining re-takers will help to analyze the drag related clues and stimulus which have bad influence on the recognition of the abstaining re-takers. However, at present the main studies at home focus on the discussions of the working principles and effects of the medicines for drug and the social prevention and intervention against drug; few studies, from the psychological point of view, touch upon the mental mechanism that the addicts have for the attention and memorization for drug. In consequence, the study posing the features of and obstacles for addicts re-recognizing as the research subjects, discovers the features of recognition from the reality of addict recognition, in a hope to get some valuable conclusion in order to impel the studies in this field and the works of prevention and treating. The study mainly adopts the behavioral measurement techniques to explore the features of and obstacles for the diamorphine addicts re-recognizing through two experiments.(1) Experiment 1, employing behaviour measuring technology, tries to investigate whether there is allomnesia for the heroin abstainers in the learning-and-recognition process of words concerning drugs and neutral information. The results show that when subjects are either unconscious or conscious to the drugs, the cognition RT of drugs and neutral information in the experiment group is significantly faster than that in control group. It means that in the word-information learning process, the subjects in experiment group are more sensitive to drugs and neutral information. The subjects do not have to contribute a large amount of cognitive resources to the cognitive processing in recognition of it; therefore, the reaction in recognition is faster. The degree of sensitiveness to drug-related information for subjects in experiment group is higher than control group. Because the drug information as heroin has given a deep mental impression to subjects in experiment group, who would react intensely to information concerning drugs, they would react quickly to the appearance of drug-related information. This indicates that these drug-addicts cannot go on with the temperate detoxification, as once they are set in the related environment, the strong craving for drugs will be stimulated which will result in relapse.(2) Experiment 2, employing behaviour measuring technology, tries to investigate whether there is disturbance of recall for the heroin abstainers in the learning-and-recognition process of pictures concerning drugs and neutral information. The results show that when subjects are either unconscious or conscious to the drugs, the cognition RT of drugs and neutral information in the experiment group is significantly faster than that in control group. It means that in the picture-information learning process, the subjects in experiment group are more sensitive to drugs and neutral information. The subjects do not have to contribute a large amount of cognitive resources to the cognitive processing in recognition of it; therefore, the reaction in recognition is faster. This indicated that if the withdrawal from drugs is not through or the drug addiction is severe, when the drug addicts are released back to the previous living environment, the stimulus from the drug-related information would arouse their desire for drugs again and makes them take drugs again.In accordance to the results of the two experiments on accuracy rate, Under the three states of attention(attention of the drug material, attention of the neutral material and null attention) ,the accuracy rate of recognition of two materials (drug-related and neutral materials) of control group is higher than that of experiment group. This means that compared with ordinary people, there may be damage of memorizing ability to some extent for the people who wean their depence on heroin, which will reduce the accuracy.According to the results of the two experiments on reaction time of recognition, it shows that, in the three attention state, the speed of the addicts who have wean their dependence on heroin were faster than the normal subjects regardless of neutral drug material. The results may be that the addicts who have wean their dependence on heroin had a richer experience of life than the normal subjects, and they were well informed and much familiar with the operation of computer while the normal subjects communicated with less people, and were poor-informed.In unconscious state, the heroin abstainers react much longer in the cognition of neutral material. the addicts who have wean their dependence on heroin react longer on drug , it indicated that they were more likely to be attracted by drug because of their previous experience on drug and resulted in longer RT of related emotions. And the normal people reacted long because of their curiosity on drug and attracted their attention which slowed down RT.In the two behavior experiments, the addicts in the couscous state, their recognition ratio of correctness on noticeable objects significantly higher than the unnoticeable objects whether the objects were drug or neutral information. It was coordinate with the results of the normal people. Therefore, it can be safely said that, the addicts who have wean their dependence on heroin can concentrate on the objects needed to be memorized and complete the task satisfactorily according to the requirements. And it was found that in the testing process of learning-recognition, the subjects had difficulties in attention which may because they experience a long time of giving up freaking out, and their attention has been recovery to some extent.Owing to the limitation on the method of RT, it can not accurately show the electronic rules in the brain of the addicts who have wean their dependence on heroin when they recognized the information on drug. Thus, it was not scientific enough to conclude from the RT that there are memory obstacles in their recognition process. In order to make the study more scientific, it requires to select the subjects with different levels of detoxification and adopt more advanced EPR (event-related potential) technology.