Addiction Neuroscience (Mar 2023)
Emotional salience of positive and negative aspects of cannabis use in cannabis use disorder: The development of a novel self-referential processing task using the late positive potential
Abstract
Background: Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) is increasingly prevalent in the United States, while perceived addiction risk and treatment-seeking are declining. Emotional salience of cannabis-use-related problems and benefits likely contribute to motivation to change, but measurement of this process has been limited. The present study sought to validate a novel assessment of emotional appraisal of self-referential cannabis-use-related information across subjective and neurophysiological units of analysis. Method: Non-treatment-seeking individuals with DSM-5 severe CUD (N = 42) completed a task that presented auditory self-referential, personalized cannabis-use-related problem and benefit statements, as well as neutral self-referential statements, during electroencephalography recording. The late positive potential (LPP) was used as a neurophysiological measure of emotional salience. Valence/arousal ratings of each statement, along with their motivational importance in sustaining vs. reducing cannabis use, were also obtained. Results: As predicted, valence and arousal ratings significantly differentiated cannabis-use-related problems and benefits from neutral statements. Partially consistent with predictions, the LPP to cannabis-use-related benefits was significantly larger than LPPs to cannabis-use-related problems and neutral statements, which did not differ from each other. Bonferroni-adjusted exploratory correlations revealed that the LPP to cannabis-use-related problems was sensitive to recent cannabis use frequency. Conclusion: These results provide some support for the validity of this novel multi-method assessment of emotional reactivity to personalized cannabis-use-related self-referential information in non-treatment-seeking individuals with severe CUD. The dissociation between subjective and neurophysiological reactivity to self-referential cannabis-related problem statements should be further explored.
