Habitual Routines and Automatic Tendencies Differential Roles in Alcohol Misuse Among Undergraduates.

Florent Wyckmans,Carole Fantini-Hauwel,Mélanie Saeremans,Charles Kornreich,Armand Chatard,Nemat Jaafari,Xavier Noël

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.607866

Abstract

There is a debate over whether actions that resist devaluation (i.e., compulsive alcohol consumption) are primarily habit- or goal-directed. The incentive habit account of compulsive actions has received support from behavioral paradigms and brain imaging. In addition, the self-reported Creature of Habit Scale (COHS) has been proposed to capture inter-individual differences in habitual tendencies. It is subdivided into two dimensions: routine and automaticity. We first considered a French version of this questionnaire for validation, based on a sample of 386 undergraduates. The relationship between two dimensions of habit and the risk of substance use disorder and impulsive personality traits was also investigated. COHS has good psychometric properties with both features of habits positively associated with an Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory score. Besides, the propensity to rely more on routines was associated with lower levels of alcohol abuse and nicotine use, suggesting that some degree of routine might act as a protective factor against substance use. In contrast, a high automaticity score was associated with an increased risk of harmful alcohol use. These results demonstrate that the COHS is a valid measure of habitual tendencies and represents a useful tool for capturing inter-individual variations in drug use problems in undergraduates.

Highlights

A constantly changing environment requires behavioral and decisional adjustments
The results indicate that individuals with compulsive disorders rely more on a habitual mode of response to the detriment of a more flexible one (Gillan et al, 2016; Voon et al, 2017; Wyckmans et al, 2019), notably in alcohol use disorder (AUD; Sjoerds et al, 2013; Sebold et al, 2014, 2017)
Creature of Habit Scale (COHS) has good psychometric properties with two distinct features of habits, namely routine behaviors and automatic responses, both of which were associated with an Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory score (OCIR) (Zermatten et al, 2006)

Summary

Introduction

A constantly changing environment requires behavioral and decisional adjustments. The repetition of reinforced actions performed within the same context results in behavior triggered automatically in that environment (Dickinson, 1985; Wood and Rünger, 2016). Measuring the relative contribution of habits and goaldirected determinants of a certain action (e.g., having a drink) remains a significant challenge for psychologists (De Houwer et al, 2018) and neuroscientists (Daw et al, 2011; Robbins, 2019) Several behavioral paradigms, such as the fabulous fruit task (de Wit et al, 2007), the Two-Step Markov Task (Daw et al, 2011), or the appetitive instrumental learning task (Ersche et al, 2016), were used to study the use of habitual and goal-oriented processes in healthy and clinical populations. Prolonged practice (Dickinson et al, 1995), acute and chronic stress (Otto et al, 2013), as well as exposure to stimulant drugs promote habit formation (Nelson and Killcross, 2006)

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