The Influence Of Episodic Future Thinking On Intertemporal Decision-making Of Heroin Abstinents

Drug addicts usually only consider immediate benefits when making decisions,regardless of long-term economic and physical losses.Therefore,the response to intertemporal choice can be used as a "behavioral marker" of addiction-related results,which is also crucial for the improvement of intertemporal choice of addicts.It is found that the delay discount rate can be significantly reduced by episodic future thinking while making intertemporal choice.The literature on substance use of future scenario imagery has focused on alcohol and tobacco use disorders and has shown that future scenario imagery can reduce cravings for alcohol and cigarettes.In addition to monetary discounting,previous studies have looked at present and future valuations of dependency substances and found that the discounting rate for dependency substances is much higher than for money,that is,drugs tend to be discounted at a higher rate than for money.Therefore,this study explored the selection preference of heroin addicts from the perspective of delay discounting,and whether the imagination of future scenarios would have an impact on the secondary level.Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of future scenario imagination on heroin addicts' intertemporal decision making.The first experiment mainly investigated whether future scenario imagination could change the delayed discount rate of heroin addicts under the condition of monetary reinforcement.The results showed that the area under the curve of heroin addicts in experiment 1 was smaller than that under the curve of the normal control group,and the area under the curve of the heroin addicts and the normal control group under the baseline condition was significantly smaller than that under the condition of imagining future scenarios.Under the baseline condition,the area under the curve of the heroin withdrawal group was significantly smaller than that of the normal control group,and the difference between the two groups was not significant under the condition of future scenario imagination.In experiment 2,the performance of heroin addicts in drug delay discounting task was compared to explore whether the future scenario can reduce the discounting rate of heroin addicts in drug intertemporal decision.The results showed that the AUC value under the curve at baseline was significantly lower than that under the curve at the future scenario.This study found that :(1)compared with the normal control group,the intertemporal decision-making ability of heroin addicts was impaired,while the intertemporal decision-making ability of heroin addicts was significantly improved by imagining future scenarios under the condition of monetary reinforcement.(2)under the condition of drug reinforcers,the intertemporal decision-making ability of heroin addicts was significantly improved by imagining future scenarios.