The Incentive Sensitization Theory of Addiction claims that
drug induced sensitization of the mesocorticolymbic system
increases the salience of the drug related stimuli. In so doing,
drug related stimuli become attention grabbing for an
addictive person. We tried to understand the socio-cognitive
underpinnings of this process in case of alcohol addiction.
The present study involves a group of participants that had
alcohol related problems and a non clinical sample. We
suggest that two implicit automatic mechanisms could predict
the attention towards alcohol related stimuli: the self
relevance of the alcohol related stimuli and the evaluation
attributed to the same stimuli. The Implicit Association Task
was used to determine the strength of these mechanisms (i.e.,
self-relevance and alcohol evaluation). The attention toward
alcohol related stimuli was assessed with the Visual Dot
Probe Task. Results showed that the two groups significantly
differed on the IAT scores, indicating stronger associations
between self and alcohol, and between alcohol and positive
words for participants that had alcohol related problems.
Moreover a stronger association between the self and the
alcohol was a significant and positive predictor of the
attentional salience of the alcohol stimuli for the clinical
sample, but not for the control group.
