Attentional Bias in Drug Dependence: Differences between Tobacco and Opium Dependents

Cognitive biases play an important role in initiation of many psychological disorders like substance dependence. The main goal of this study was comparison attentional bias between tobacco and opium dependent individuals. To do so. two experiments were conducted using dot probe task to investigate attentional bias for stimulus cues in opium and tobacco dependents. The results of experiment I showed that opium dependents compared to non-dependents had shorter reaction time to drug related words. Findings of experiment 2 indicated that there was significant difference between smokers and non-sniokcrs on attentional bias to smoking related words, as tobacco dependents showed greater attentional bias to smoking related cues. Comparison between experiment I and experiment 2 showed that opium and tobacco dependents had no significant difference on attentional bias but opium dependents had longer reaction time for stimulus words than smokers. This difference was not in case of neutral words. The results support this idea that tendency to sustain attention on stimulus cues differ across various addict groups.