A hallmark of the Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA) is its emphasis on getting individuals to increase their engagement in healthy old and new rewarding activities that can compete with substance use. The personality dimension extraversion seems to be an important mechanism underlying activity engagement. A median split classified 265 patients with substance use disorders as high or low on NEO-FFI extraversion scores. Group comparisons indicated that patients with low NEO-FFI extraversion scores reported lower pleasant activity levels in general, and lower intensity of social interactions in particular. The disparity between conditions as far as what they valued was relative, since both groups pinpointed a wealth of potentially pleasant activities that could play a role in achieving non-substance related positive reinforcement for sobriety.
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