Psychological Addiction Within Brain Dysfunction - Essay Example

Psychology - Evaluate addiction in terms of brain dysfunction Introduction Theory of addiction is described as synthetic theory that aims at incorporating elements of other theories on drug addiction. Dependence on drugs and other activities arise from a normal instrumental learning mechanism that operates outside conscious awareness. Drugs such as heroin and nicotine reward behaviour that leads to them. Addictive behaviours become difficult to stop through a process that can occur without the individual being aware of what is happening, and it does not involve an active decision-making process. In fact it does not require the individual to feel positive pleasure from the behaviour (West, 2006). There are two types of forces that forces that enhances purposeful behaviour in human beings: inhibitory forces and impulses. Each of these forces is balanced, checked and regulated by tasks of planning and evaluation. The behavioural plans that human beings propose for themselves, and the evaluation they make of their behaviour help to give identity and purpose (Baxter & Hinson, 2001). For instance if a man recognizes himself as addicted to smoking, but evaluate the smoking behaviour as a risk to mental functioning, then he will be able to formulate a plan that would displace the behaviour. Addiction Theory of addiction is viewed as chronic brain disorder that can be managed with all the tools at medicine's disposal. The addict's brain is claimed to be malfunctioning, just like the pancreas of someone with diabetes. The major distributing factor is the behaviour and lifestyle choices (Eugene & Heather, 2003). Genetics have found that there are gene variants that predispose people to addiction that explains why some people who tries addiction becomes hooked on it. The laboratories that are operated and funded by PET and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) are forcing the addicted brain to yield up its secrets. According to West (2006), Neuroscientists are mapping the intricate network of feedback loops and triggers that are set in motion by the taste, sight or thought of a beer or a cigarette. They have learned to identified a signal that an alcoholic is about to pour a drink, and trace the impulse back to its origin in the primitive midbrain. Among the numerous compounds tested by NIDA are compounds that block the intoxicating effects of drugs. They include vaccines that train the body's own immune system to bar them from the brain Addiction as Brain dysfunction Addictive drugs like heroine and cocaine flood the brain with the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is a chemical that induces a sensation of pleasure and trains the subconscious mind to remember everything that proceed that sensation. Alcohol, amphetamines and nicotine, together with cocaine and heroine are considered the hardest drugs to give up (West, 2006). Drugs are substances that tap into brain's operation system and disrupt the way nerve cells normally send, receive and process information. Drugs can disrupt the brain's operation in two ways: can imitate the brain's natural chemical messengers and over-stimulate the reward circuit of the brain. Most drugs fool the brain's receptors and activate the nerve cells to send abnormal messages (Bannon et al, 2002). Nearly all drugs target the brain's reward system; they do this by flooding the circuit with dopamine. With continued drug abuse, the brain adapts the overwhelming surges in dopamine by reducing the number of dopamine receptors in the reward circuit; this will lessened the impact on the reward circuit, hence reducing the users ability to enjoy the drugs and things that earlier brought pleasure (West, 2006). According to Bannon et al (2002), long term abuse causes changes in other brain systems and circuit as well as facilitating non-conscious learning, which makes the learner to experience uncontrollable carvings whenever they see a person or place that is associated with the drug experience. Research indicates that drug-addicted individuals are show changes in regions of the brain that are critical to decision-making, judgment, learning and behaviour control. Brain dysfunction ranges from complete loss of consciousness to disorientation, as well as inability to pay attention. It also involves the impairment of one or many specific functions that contributes to the conscious experience. The type of severity of brain depends on the extent of brain damage, as well as the speed at which the damaging progresses (Adams & white, 2005). Brain dysfunction may diffuse to specific area, and is caused by disorders that affect large areas of the brain; they include disorders that cause metabolic abnormalities, infection such as meningitis, very low or very high blood pressure and addiction. The symptoms consistent with dysfunction of the brain include among others problems related to planning, problem solving, decision making, short-term memory and poor motivation. The case of acute alcoholic induced amnesia in some individuals showed minimal brain functioning in the frontal and medial regions of the brain. Adams & White (2002) examined forty patients with alcohol, dependency, with some of the patients having antisocial personality disorder. The alcoholics were studied after execution of the withdrawal symptoms, using brain stem auditory evoked potentials. It was found that there was a significant reduction in cerebral blood flow measurements of the alcoholic patients. The lowest flow was encountered in the front part of the brain. This is a clear indication that alcoholism is a major contributor to the functioning of the brain. Classical conditioning and addiction The theory of classical conditioning proposes that, drug craving arises because of a repeated pairing of environmental stimuli with drug effects. For instance, falling blood alcohol level induces a withdrawal syndrome such craving. After a particular period of abstinence, it is possible for the stimuli associated with falling blood alcohol levels to elicit a conditioned withdrawal response that resemble alcohol withdrawal. West (2006) claims that cue elicited craving may be more predictive of a relapse than withdrawal related craving; this is because relapse can only occur in situations of drug availability which is when cue elicited craving occurs. It can also be proposed as the basis for urges and relapse long after the acute withdrawal phase has passed. There is no doubt that classical conditioning plays a major role in the experience of drug addiction and the dependence syndromes surrounding it. It also plays an important role as it continues the addictive activity, but so far, it is not clear whether the same mechanism can be effective in helping addicts to recover (Bannon et al, 2002). According to Incentive sensitisation theory, compulsive drug use results from the effects of drugs on the mechanism that establishes certain stimuli as triggers for appetitive behaviours. While habitation occurs to the value of drugs, sensitization occurs to the consequence of the drugs in establishing the salience of these cues. This creates dissociation between how much satisfaction a drug provides and the degree to which it is sought. The incentive theory of addiction focuses on how drug cues trigger excessive incentive motivation for drugs, leading to compulsive drug seeking, drug taking and relapse (Baxter & Hinson, 2001). The theory proposes that while drug pleasure becomes less important during the transition to addiction, the incentive motivation to use the drug increases. Incentive salience is a characteristic of the mental representation of stimulus, which is expressed in terms of wanting. The wanting system can be activated implicitly and can affect the behaviour without the person having the conscious emotion, goal or desire. Brief subliminal presentations of faces expressing positive emotions can activate implicit wanting and so lead to an increase in subsequent consumption of a beverage. For addicts, doses of drugs that are too low to produce any conscious experience of pleasure can trigger implicit wanting as indicated by an increase in drug-seeking behaviour. Ingestion of addictive drugs causes the circuitry to become sensitised so that further consumption of drugs produce greater effect. The cues associated with drugs can lead to pathological wanting since excessive incentive salience is attributed chiefly to them (West, 2006). The theory of sensitised incentive allows the possibility that excessive wanting may be complied in at least some addicts. The dissociation between wanting and liking is a powerful non-obvious statement that has a great deal of appeal. According to Baxter and Hinston (2001), dissociation between wanting and liking in the incentive sensation theory represents a important step towards the goal of understanding why the link between addictiveness of a certain drug and the degree to which it gives pleasure is weak. Addiction as a choice According to Cognitive bias theories, addiction arises and is maintained by the tendency of the addict to pay greater attention to particular addiction-related information. In other words, it is maintained by biases in the cognitive system, including expectancies, beliefs, attributions, self-efficacy and attention. The cognitive bias theory is regarded as an extension of expectancy approach. This theory indicates that it is biases in beliefs and in attention and memory processes linked to these beliefs that are at the root of problem of addiction (Adams & White, 2005). Moreover, the theory of incentive sensitisation proposes that expectancies that motivate behaviour reside in memory and that tasks that examine storage and recall of memory of information can be used to detect biases that may be operating. The advantage with this theory is that it does not rely on self report, as well as the problems related to it. According to this theory, the loss of control demonstrated by addicts can be explained by automatic and preconscious cue processing of stimuli related to addiction. Baxter et al (2001) proposes that potential drug cues are evaluated pre-attentively and prioritized to trigger behavioural an cognitive responses. The information processing is subjected to automatic attention and interpretive biases, thus enhances addict's awareness of his or her physiological arousal, as well as action tendencies and cognitions. The theory of predictions proposes that a price will have a small initial effect on consumption but this will grow with time until anew steady state is reached. The effect of price on cigarette consumption appears to be immediate and similar observations have been made to for alcohol and heroine. However, the theory can always claim that the effects are progressive but over a relatively short time scale or that other factors also contribute (Baumeister et al, 1994). Furthermore, the theory predicts that for individuals an addictive pattern of consumption will be triggered by stressful events; this is because the overall utility of the individual will be reduced and the marginal utility from consuming the addictive good relative to it will be greater. It is argued that the reason that addicts generally appear to be more distressed than non-addicts is that distress has led them to addiction and keeps them in it. The conflicting observations can be explained away in terms of measures that are used or other confounding variables (Adams & White, 2005). According to Baron (2000), addiction is a behaviour chosen because the drugs alleviate feelings of anxiety, help to control aggressive impulse, as well as coping with psychotic symptoms; for instance, most smokers utilize the drug as a stress reliever. However, current smokers report higher levels of stress than non smokers. In addition to that, when smokers stop their stress levels actually decrease and when they relapse, they go up again. Generally, cigarette has acute effect on stress because it relieves withdrawal symptoms that arise when the smoker cannot smoke, but there is a chronic effect in increasing stress (Hunter, 2008). Similarly, acute intoxication in alcohol can help people forget their troubles, ease pain and calm fears. However, there might be a rebound increase in anxiety, once the effect has worn off. In addition to that, repeated intoxication has an adverse effect on the life of the drinker which leads to increased stress and anxiety (Baumeister et al, 1994). Informed choice and addiction theory proposes that, people who are first introduced to the addiction behaviour know the risks of taking drugs but are still willing to take the risks. Once they have taken samples of drugs, and discover what it entails and deliver, their preferences are adjusted accordingly. Agar and Reisinger (2002), claims that an addict is aware of the outset that he or she might become addicted and is willing to take the risk. The risks are those of becoming addicted, and the physical and social harm that the activity might cause, which may include shame, embarrassment at being someone who gambles, takes heroin or smoke. An addict makes appraisal of the likelihood of each of the various outcomes, for instance, a person who begins to use heroin may start with a view in mind that the chances of becoming a compulsive user of the drug is minimal (Baron, 2000). According to Adams and White (2005), an alcoholic who abstains from alcohol is likely to show changes in behaviour, spatial ability, abstract reasoning and motor coordination. A psychological assessment showed that there were improvements in brain functioning for the addicts who managed to abstain for some time. Moreover, he found that it was possible to demonstrate the impaired performance in abstract reasoning; abstract reasoning was improved after some weeks of abstinence. He concluded that addiction is not a disease but a behaviour that can be reversed after some time, if the addict abstains from the drug of addiction. Addiction involves choice because addicts are aware of the risks and they deliberately select from many options (Davidson, 2001). On the other hand, addiction is informed because the addicts are aware of all the information about the risks and benefits. It involves rationality since the process by which it is used to arrive at a decision is one that maximises the chances of arriving at what for that person is the best outcome. Conclusions According to West (2006), alcoholics, smokers, opiate addicts, overeaters and gamblers are more likely to lapse when they face negative emotional states. Most people often engage in addictive behaviour because of its effectiveness in controlling stress. Withdrawal from addictive drugs is proposed to cause unpleasant mood changes and brain dysregulation reward systems, which involves some of neurochemical systems implicated in the acute reinforcing effects of drugs. The theory of addiction proposes that compulsive behaviour require dysfunction within the two cortical systems of the brain; the anterior cingulated cortex and the orbit frontal cortex, which are critically involved in self-regulation and together form the core of the inhibitory system. West (2006) claims that, people should exercise restraint over stimuli for addictive behaviour, in order to reduce the effectiveness of human behaviour that is addictive. For instance, an obsessive behaviour, whose subject may demand that they receive no relief at all from taking alcohol, and dislike the habit, but persist in the behaviour and become anxious after getting drunk; drug taking may feel so disliked by that an individual may feel inhibited from them, but find it so difficult to do away with drugs due to addiction. Some addicts relapse even when they completely don't like the drug to which they are addicted; this is because the neural systems are sensitized to drug taking are significantly connected to desiring. References Adams, J. & White, M.(2005). Why don't stage based activity promotion interventions work Health education, 20(2), 237 -243. Agar, M., & Reisinger, H.S. (2002). A heroin epidemic at the intersection o histories: the 1960s epidemic among Americans in Baltimore.Med Anthropol , 21(2), 115-156. Bannon, S., Gonsalvez C.J et al (2002). Response inhibition deficits in obsessive - compulsive disorder. Psychiatry Res, 110(2), 165-174. Baron, J. (2000). Thinking and Deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge university press. Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton T. F. et al (1994). Losing control: how and why people fail at self-regulation. San Diego: academic press. Baxter, B. W., & Hinson, R. E. (2001). Is smoking automatic Demands of smoking behaviour on attention resources. J Abnorm psychol, 110(1), 59-66. Davidson, R. (2001). Conspiracy, cults and choices. Addiction Research & Theory. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. . Eugene, R. V., & Heather, N. (2003). Choice, behavioural economics, and addiction. Singapore: Longman. Hunter, W. S. (2008). Psychological abstracts.Cambridge: Cambridge University. West, R. (2006). Theory of addiction. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Read More