Citation

Asaoka Y, Won M, Morita T, Ishikawa E, Goto Y. Int. J. Neuropsychopharmacol. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1093/ijnp/pyaa044

PMID

32574348

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Accumulating evidence suggests that deficits in decision making and judgment may be involved in several psychiatric disorders, including addiction. Behavioral addiction is a conceptually new psychiatric condition, raising a debate of what criteria would define behavioral addiction, and several impulse control disorders are equivalently considered as behavioral addiction. In this preliminary study with a relatively small sample size, we investigated how decision making and judgment were compromised in behavioral addiction to further characterize this psychiatric condition.

METHODS: Healthy control subjects (n=31) and patients with kleptomania and paraphilia as behavioral addiction (n=16) were recruited. A battery of questionnaires for assessments of cognitive biases and economic decision making, and a psychological test for assessment of the jumping-to-conclusions bias with functional near-infrared spectroscopy recordings of prefrontal cortical (PFC) activity were conducted.

RESULTS: Although behavioral addicts exhibited stronger cognitive biases than controls in the questionnaire, such difference was primarily due to lower intelligence in the patients. Behavioral addicts also exhibited higher risk taking in economic decision making, and worse performance indicating compromised probability judgment, along with diminished PFC activity in the right hemisphere.

CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that behavioral addiction may involve impairments of probability judgment associated with attenuated PFC activity, which consequently lead to higher risk taking in decision making.

Language: en

Keywords

Behavioral addiction; Cognitive bias; Impulse control disorder; Prefrontal cortex; Probability judgment