Smartphone-Based Study Links Risky Decision-Making to Alcohol Consumption Increases
Increases in risk-taking behavior among people with mild to moderate alcohol use disorder precede spikes in actual drinking rather than resulting from them, according to a longitudinal study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. The research, which tracked participants over a one-year period using smartphone-based assessments and gamified decision-making tasks, marks the first time scientists have successfully used such digital tools to predict real-life drinking fluctuations over time.
How Gamified Smartphone Tasks Tracked Alcohol Use Disorder Over One Year
Investigators tracked participants who mostly had mild to moderate alcohol use disorder and experienced substantial drinking fluctuations over time. Researchers deployed smartphone-based versions of experimental gambling and cognitive tasks to monitor changes without relying solely on traditional interviews or self-reports. Monthly shifts in specific aspects of decision-making predicted subsequent alcohol consumption. Participants drank more in months following periods when their risk-taking increased in mixed gambling contexts, but decreased in loss contexts. Decreased information sampling biases similarly predicted higher subsequent alcohol consumption.
What Temporal Direction Means for Future Alcohol Use Disorder Interventions
The temporal direction of these behavioral changes was specific to decision-making and did not occur in reverse, even after researchers accounted for previous drinking volumes. Dr. Hilmar Zech, a postdoctoral research fellow at University Hospital Würzburg and Technische Universität Dresden, noted that these shifts preceded drinking increases rather than following them. Conversely, fluctuations in self-control, such as response inhibition and working memory, and reward-driven behavior showed no association with subsequent drinking changes. Editor-in-Chief Cameron S. Carter of the University of California Irvine School of Medicine explained that smartphone-based gamified tasks can identify high-risk periods for individuals with alcohol use disorder, paving the way for real-time, mechanism-based interventions.
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