Behavioral Inhibition and Addiction

This chapter describes tasks that have been developed to measure behavioral inhibition in the laboratory. It examines how these measures add to the understanding of drug addiction as a problem of deficient inhibitory control. The behavioral inhibition tasks fall under two categories: inhibition as control of manual action; and inhibition as control of attention. Measures of behavioral inhibition are described in the context of studies that seek to characterize drug abusers in terms of deficits in their ability to inhibit specific actions, and in studies that test direct effects of abused drugs on inhibitory control over these actions. These measures are examined with a focus on methodological issues concerning their use in experimental research and on their psychometric properties, including reliability, validity, and standardization. The chapter finally discusses the limitations of laboratory measures of behavioral inhibition in addiction research and future directions for increasing their utility. This edition first published 2013