The brain regions and neural processes that underlie addiction overlap extensively with those that support cognitive functions, including learning, memory, and reasoning. Drug activity in these regions and processes during early stages of abuse foster strong maladaptive associations between drug use and environmental stimuli that may underlie future cravings and drug-seeking behaviors. With continued drug use, cognitive deficits ensue that exacerbate the difficulty of establishing sustained abstinence. The developing brain is particularly susceptible to the effects of drugs of cognitive dissonance and addiction abuse; prenatal, childhood, and adolescent exposures produce long-lasting changes in cognition.
1. Pan-Entertainment Mobile Live Broadcast Platform
The take-home lesson is that our reasoning is biased by our desires and motivations. Research shows that justifications give people the impression that they made a careful decision. In the face of temptation (problematic desires), we need to dispute rationally our distorted reasoning and the judgments that follow.
Cognitive Dissonance and Addiction Behaviors
- For people with substance abuse, they have to push past constant dissonance because they know there is dangerous stuff happening.
- However, the two most famous approaches go to psychologist Aaron Beck and Dr. David Burns, who helped popularize these negative thinking patterns giving more examples and easy-to-remember names.
- With the exception of motives for drinking, there has been considerable variation in methods for assessing motives for a given substance or class of substances (e.g., prescription drug misuse), which can sometimes make it difficult to draw clear conclusions 24.
- Many people need to hit personal rock bottom to see through the denial and decide that they’ve had enough.
A person with cognitive dissonance experiences mental conflict and may take steps to try to resolve it. This could include changes in behavior or attempts to ignore information that contradicts a goal or desire. For example, a smoker might quit smoking or instead rationalize their behavior by saying other habits are just as dangerous. Rationalizations play a significant role in perpetuating addiction by allowing individuals to justify and maintain their destructive behaviors. By understanding the common rationalizations and their impact on the recovery process, individuals, loved ones, and professionals can better address the cognitive distortions that contribute to addiction.
Treatments
All this involves putting aside any previously what is Oxford House held beliefs that may have been limiting or self-destructive in any way. The key is to notice when the pattern of delusional thinking starts to exacerbate and to challenge the feelings and thoughts to prevent relapse from occurring. All this might explain why certain concepts and ideas appear rational to some people and entirely irrational for others (such as an addict’s ability to justify their excessive drinking).
Your therapist will guide you through strategies to challenge and reframe these inconsistent thoughts. This might involve questioning the validity of certain beliefs, exploring where they came from, and considering alternative perspectives. I know that using drugs/alcohol might cause me to lose my drivers’ license, employment, spouse, health or freedom, but I continue to use because it helps me keep my anger under control. In therapy, Cognitively Dissonant individuals will start to notice a shift in previously held beliefs, and begin to acknowledge how they have justified their addictions in the past. This type of increase in delusional thinking often creates many challenges for those in addiction recovery, and those hoping to avoid relapse. According to mental health experts, mental health is the ability to handle uncertainty – and those with a higher threshold for delay tend to experience less distress and Cognitive Dissonance than those with lower scores.
Cognitive Dissonance in Social Psychology
This causes people to participate in behaviors that will minimize their stress and discomfort. Clinical and laboratory research has implicated pre-natal exposure to methamphetamine in both cognitive deficits and altered brain structure. The drug-exposed children also exhibited poorer long-term spatial memory and visual/motor integration. Another study documented structural changes in the frontal and parietal cortex of 3- and 4-year-old children who had been exposed prenatally to methamphetamine (Cloak et al., 2009). In the first stage, the individual’s occasional drug taking becomes increasingly chronic and uncontrolled.
For example, Ye, Cho, Chen, and Jia 11 found a positive relationship between users’ perception of information overload and discontinuous usage intention in social media platforms. Moreover, the literature has widely documented the negative effects of user addiction on cognitive dissonance 90,91. Pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast users experience information overload, service overload, and user addiction, leading to cognitive dissonance and resulting in discontinuous usage intention. Homogeneous content domain overload and heterogeneous information impact contribute to cognitive dissonances, such as anxiety, guilt, and regret, while the platform’s functions may exceed individual cognitive and processing abilities. The individual heterogeneous cognitive structure and negative effects of user addiction can also trigger cognitive dissonance, which can be alleviated by the behavioral intention of stopping use or uninstalling it.
Cognitive Dissonance and Relapse
The heterotrait–monotrait ratio of validity, also known as the ratio of between-trait to within-trait correlations, is used to assess the discriminant validity of different constructs. It compares the average correlations between indicators of different constructs to the averages between indicators of the same construct. As shown in the Table 4, the results indicate that the HTMT values between each pair of variables in this study are below 0.85, indicating good discriminant validity for each variable. The discriminant validity analysis is to verify whether there is a statistical difference between two different constructs.
Mason is detail oriented, organized, efficient oral and written communicator, and passionate about creating a positive workplace for our staff and an excellent recovery environment for our clients. Matt is credentialed as CADC-CS (Certified Alcohol & Drug Counselor – Clinical Supervisor) through CCAPP (California Consortium of Addiction Programs and Professionals). He helped create an effective, holistic alcohol & drug treatment curriculum that has been in use at Elevate Addiction Services since 2015. Lisa is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over 25 years of clinical experience working in the field of addiction treatment and mental health stabilization and care. Is an accredited drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, that believes addiction treatment should not just address “how to stay sober” but needs to transform the life of the addict and empower him or her to create a more meaningful and positive life. We are dedicated to transforming the despair of addiction into a purposeful life of confidence, self-respect and happiness.
How Does Cognitive Dissonance Influence Your Ability to Recover from a Substance Use Disorder?
The technique involves exposure to a hierarchy of cues, which signal craving and subsequently substance use. These are presented repeatedly without the previously learned pattern of drinking so as to lead to extinction. Despite work on cue reactivity, there is limited empirical support for the efficacy of cue exposure in recent literature14.