The individualized alcohol Stroop task: no attentional bias toward personalized stimuli in alcohol-dependents.

This study aimed to investigate attentional bias in alcohol-dependent patients and control participants with regard to individualized (specific) and nonindividualized (general) alcohol-related words. First, it was assumed that alcohol-dependents rather than control participants are more distracted by alcohol-related words, particularly individualized alcohol-related words, than by non-alcohol-related words. Second, words which are derived from participants' individual drinking experiences were assumed to induce the highest Stroop interference over all participants. Alcohol-dependent patients (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, n = 39) and healthy control participants with a moderate consume of alcohol (n = 33) completed a modified alcohol Stroop task based on word stimuli derived from four categories: neutral versus negative and specific versus general alcohol-related words. While alcohol-dependents showed similar RTs in the different word categories, control participants showed the slowest reactions after presentation of specific alcohol-related words. Generally, alcohol-dependents had slower RTs than controls did. The results do not corroborate the hypothesis of increased interference caused by specific alcohol-related words in alcohol-dependents-instead, this presumption seems to apply to the control participants only. As we did not find any special impact of personally relevant alcohol-related words outclassing the influence of preselected alcohol-related words in the patient group, the benefit of individualized stimuli should be reconsidered. Our results do not support the relevance of attentional retraining programs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).