Xavier Noel

By Xavier Noël

Part of the book: Psychology

By Xavier Noël, Antoine Bechara, Mélanie Saeremans, Charles Kornreich, Clémence Dousset, Salvatore Campanella, Armand Chatard, Nemat Jaafari and Macha Dubuson

Addiction behaviors are characterized by conditioned responses responsible for craving and automatic actions as well as disturbances within the supervisory network, one of the key elements of which is the inhibition of prepotent response. Interventions such as brain stimulation and cognitive training targeting this imbalanced system can potentially be a positive adjunct to treatment as usual. The relevance of several invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation techniques in the context of addiction as well as several cognitive training protocols is reviewed. By reducing cue-induced craving and modifying the pattern of action, memory associations, and attention biases, these interventions produced significant but still limited clinical effects. A new refined definition of response inhibition, including automatic inhibition of response and a more consistent approach to cue exposure capitalizing on the phase of reconsolidation of pre-activated emotional memories, all associated with brain and cognitive stimulation, opens new avenues for clinical research.

Part of the book: Inhibitory Control Training