Project Details
Projekt
RP5: Daily stress, attentional bias, and inhibitory control in buying-shopping disorder and social network use disorder
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411232260
According to the I-PACE (Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution) model, the interaction of affective responses to addiction-related, conditioned stimuli with attentional bias and impaired inhibitory control represents a key mechanism in the development and maintenance of addictive behaviors, including buying-shopping disorder (BSD) and social network use disorder (SNUD). It is further assumed that these affective and cognitive processes are triggered by stress. In the first funding period, RP5 investigated the effect of acute stress on affective and cognitive processes in women with either BSD or SNUD using the Trier Social Stress Test. RP5 will continue to address the role of stress in BSD and SNUD in the second funding period by applying an experience sampling method. Additionally, attentional processes and inhibitory control will be investigated with new behavioral tasks in the laboratory setting. RP5 will include women, men, and individuals who define themselves as non-binary in order to explore potential gender/sex differences. The sample will comprise individuals with pathological use of either online shopping applications (BSD group, n=60) or social network sites (SNUD, n=60), and two control groups with non-problematic use patterns (each n=60), matched by age and gender to the respective group with pathological use. The study will consist of three parts: two individual laboratory sessions with experimental paradigms (t1, t2) and five consecutive days with ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in between. At t1, all participants will complete the comprehensive FOR2974 core battery and will be introduced to the subsequent EMA, which examines the relationships between daily stress and first-choice application use in the natural environment. The EMA will be combined with saliva sampling to measure the stress biomarkers cortisol (as an indicator of HPA axis activation) and alpha-amylase (as an indicator of sympathetic nervous system activation). At t2, participants will perform a change blindness flicker task with eye-tracking and a stop-signal task. The flicker task allows for a complex stimulus configuration and will be used to measure both initial orienting and maintained attention during visual search in a grid of addiction-related images. The stop-signal task will be used to assess stimulus-specific response inhibition. The research project is strongly linked to RP4, which also addresses the role of stress, and to RP2, RP8, and RP10, as these projects focus on psychological processes in either BSD or SNUD or both.
DFG Programme
Research Units
