Can’t take my eyes off of you: The role of cognitive biases, reward sensitivity and executive control in adolescent substance use and abuse

What makes young individuals more likely to develop problematic substance use, and which cognitive processes underlie the development from experimental or recreational to harmful substance use? These two questions were the starting point for the current project. This dissertation presents five studies that investigated several factors that may be involved in adolescent substance (ab)use, including proneness to detect signals of reward, selective attention for substance cues, automatic approach tendencies, and low executive control. Adolescents with high levels of substance (ab)use showed a relatively high sensitivity for signals of reward, a difficulty to redirect their attention away from substance cues, and a relatively positive affective judgment of substances. An important next step is to experimentally manipulate these factors (e.g., via Attentional Bias Modification) in order to ascertain their causal status, and to investigate their relevance as targets for preventive and therapeutic interventions