Interference-based methods to mitigate gambling craving: a proof-of-principle pilot study

Cornil, Aurélien [UCL] Rothen, Stéphane [Hopitaux Universitaires de Genève] De Timary, Philippe [UCL] Billieux, Joël [Université de Lausanne]

Craving is central in the prognosis of gambling disorder. The ela-borated intrusion theory (EIT) provides a sound framework to account for craving in addictive disorders, and interference meth-ods inspired from the EIT have substantiated their effectiveness in mitigating substance and food-related cravings. The principle of these methods is to recruit the cognitive resources underlying craving (e.g., visuospatial skills, mental imagery) for another com-petitive and cognitively demanding task, thus reducing the vivid-ness and overwhelming nature of craving. Here we conducted two experiments employing a between-subjects design to test the effi-cacy of interference methods for reducing laboratory-induced crav-ing. In these experiments, gamblers (n = 38 for both experiments) first followed a craving induction procedure. They then performed either a visuospatial interference task (making a mental and vivid image of a bunch of keys [experiment 1] or playing the video game Tetris [experiment 2]; experimental conditions) or another task supposed not to recruit visuospatial skills and mental imagery (exploding bubble pack [experiment 1] or counting backwards [experiment 2]; control conditions). Results show that all methods successively mitigated induced craving. Although previous research evidenced the superiority of visuospatial tasks to reduce substance- related craving, our findings question their superiority in the con-text of gambling craving.