A-Level Psychology (AQA)

Topic Summaries

Addiction

Reducing addiction

  • Behavioural interventions:
    • Aversion therapy: based on classical conditioning and wants to countercondition the individual. This is done through repeated exposures between addictive stimulus and unpleasant sensation, making an association, so that the link between the substance and good feeling is broken. For alcohol addictions, a patient can be given an emetic (a drug that makes you sick) after consuming alcohol to immediately create the sensation of a hangover, making them associate alcohol with unpleasant consequences. For gambling addictions, a patient could be given two second electric shocks when reading words associated with gambling such as ‘jackpot.’
    • Covert sensitisation: uses the same mechanisms as aversion therapy but the patient only imagines the negative consequences. These situations have to be equally unpleasant for it to work.
  • Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT):
    • CBT assumes that faulty cognitive processing is the key to a patient’s addiction and therefore needs to be challenged. This happens through functional analysis and skills acquisition. It aims to identify the situations and stimuli that trigger the start of doing addictive behaviour. It also accounts for the emotions the patient is feeling before, during, and after engaging in addiction. This requires strong rapport and trust between the patient and their therapist in order to challenge irrational beliefs.
    • The therapist explains the irrationality of a patient’s cognitive biases. For example, if a therapist is treating a person with a nicotine/smoking addiction, they will logically explain the harmful effects on their health.
    • Specific skills: therapist and patient make links between the patient’s life problems and their disorder. Anger management training is an example of this technique. They identify the emotions that act as an indicator of aggression.
    • Social skill development: the therapist teaches methods to ignore or reduce the impact of triggering stimulus. The therapist will model methods that a patient will copy through role play.

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