Cognitive Mechanisms of a Brief Intervention to Reduce Heavy Drinking
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Cognitive Mechanisms of an Intervention to Reduce Heavy Drinking
IRAS ID
170106
Contact name
Elly McGrath
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 3 months, 1 days
Research summary
Alcohol misuse is one of the most significant health and social concerns in the UK. It has been estimated that at least 10 million adults regularly exceed the recommended weekly units of alcohol (Boniface and Shelton, 2013). Such heavy drinking is associated with a range of health problems, and costs to the NHS of alcohol-related harms have been estimated at approximately £3 billion, with total costs of alcohol harms (including costs of policing and crime, absenteeism etc) rising to at least £6 billion.
Various studies have shown that heavy alcohol use may be associated with specific patterns of cognitive function, such as increased impulsivity, decreased executive control and altered reward mechanisms (Field et al, 2008). Neuropsychological tests can be used to examine these profiles.
Many people want to decrease their alcohol consumption and simple interventions have proved effective in helping people do just that. For example “implementation intentions” is a brief intervention aimed at improving control of drinking behaviour (Armitage, 2009). Such an intervention is hypothesised to be associated with changes in cognitive mechanisms: increasing control over drinking and decreasing impulsive drinking. This project will combine techniques from cognitive neuroscience, health psychology and epidemiology to study changes in cognitive mechanisms following the formation of an implementation intention to reduce heavy drinking. This has the potential of informing future research to improve the effectiveness of such interventions.
Study Hypotheses
H1: Intervention participants will show larger reductions in alcohol consumption than controls at immediate and one month follow-up
H2: Intervention participants will show improved performance on all neurocognitive tasks compared to controls at immediate and one month follow-up
H3: Intervention participants will show stronger word pair associations on the tailored word pairing task.REC name
London - Brighton & Sussex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/0835
Date of REC Opinion
26 May 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion