Emotional Regulation Technique for Cocaine Addiction

An emotion regulation strategy known as cognitive reappraisal helps to reduce the typically heightened and habitual attention to drug-related reminders and contexts in cocaine-addicted individuals.

Emotional regulation refers to automatic or controlled process encompasses to use both positive and negative feelings to modify the most important pieces of information and motivates us to attend to it in a way that wouldn’t evoke stress or fear for right behavior.

Cognitive reappraisal is one such emotion regulation strategy used by Mount Sinai researchers to study the impact of this form of habit disruption mediated by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the brain in reducing the compulsive drug-seeking behavior and relapse of cocaine addiction published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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‘Emotions act as compass for cocaine addiction.’

"Relapse in addiction is often precipitated by heightened attention-bias to drug-related cues, which could consist of sights, smells, conversations, anything that reminds someone of their previous drug use," said lead author Muhammad A. Parvaz, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Cocaine addiction is a recognized treatment-resistant disorder due to chronic use of a powerful central nervous system stimulant substance that poses serious health risk and causes attention bias, a risk factor for relapse is becoming an epidemic nationally and globally.

using cognitive reappraisal, the individuals are trained to self-regulate (thereby engaging the prefrontal cortex) the emotional response that disrupts the habitual enhanced attention allocation to drug-related reminder in individuals with cocaine use disorder.

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This study provides a framework for using readily deployable cognitive behavioral and personalized intervention strategy for drug addiction and pathway for future research in empirically-validated neuroscience-based interventions for drug addiction.

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Source-Medindia

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