ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to scrutinise the state of empirical evidence supporting the controlled and automatic accounts of addiction. Cognitive psychology has characterised automatic processes underpinning addictive behaviour as fast, stimulus-bound, difficult to control, effortless and unconscious. Controlled processes have the opposite characteristics. Cognitive procedures seek to test whether drug-related behaviour better matches one set of characteristics. Methods devised by comparative psychologists to study the mental life of animals have been translated to help determine whether addiction is controlled or automatic. Support for each position will be evaluated in four categories of learning: Pavlovian conditioning, Pavlovian to instrumental transfer, instrumental conditioning, and incentive learning/self-medication. Reactivity to external drug cues is usually explained by Pavlovian conditioning. The self-medication hypothesis claims that drugs are taken to alleviate adverse states and depression and anxiety do indeed prime drug-seeking. Several other human outcome devaluation studies provide indirect support for a habit account of addiction.
