Habitual Routines and Automatic Tendencies Differential Roles in Alcohol Misuse Among Undergraduates

Abstract

There is a debate over whether actions that resist devaluation (i.e., compulsive alcohol consumption) are primarily habit- or goal-directed. The incentive habit account of compulsive actions has received support from behavioral paradigms and brain imaging. In addition, the self-reported Creature of Habit Scale (COHS) has been proposed to capture inter-individual differences in habitual tendencies. It is subdivided into two dimensions: routine and automaticity. We first considered a French version of this questionnaire for validation, based on a sample of 386 undergraduates. The relationship between two dimensions of habit and the risk of substance use disorder and impulsive personality traits was also investigated. COHS has good psychometric properties with both features of habits positively associated with an Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory score. Besides, the propensity to rely more on routines was associated with lower levels of alcohol abuse and nicotine use, suggesting that some degree of routine might act as a protective factor against substance use. In contrast, a high automaticity score was associated with an increased risk of harmful alcohol use. These results demonstrate that the COHS is a valid measure of habitual tendencies and represents a useful tool for capturing inter-individual variations in drug use problems in undergraduates.

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“…The automaticity subscale was of particular interest in the present study. Previous research indicates that this subscale is a valid measure of automaticity 3 (Ersche et al, 2017, 2019, 2021; Wyckmans et al, 2020). No other measures were assessed as moderating variables in this study.…”

“…3Recent research indicates that the automaticity subscale of the creature of habit scale has excellent psychometric properties (Ersche et al, 2017), it is strongly linked to other self-report measures of impulsivity and compulsion (Ersche et al, 2019), it predicts to the balance between goal-directed behavior and habitual response tendencies in a contingency degradation paradigm (Ersche et al, 2021), it discriminates individuals who have enhanced automatic habitual behaviors such as drug users (Ersche et al, 2021), and it is associated with reduced neural activations in brain structures associated with dysregulation of habits (Ersche et al, 2021). Moreover, the automaticity subscale has been validated in French language before being used in the present research (Wyckmans et al, 2020). …”

Differential influence of habit components on compulsive and problematic reward-seeking behavior

“…Please note that a French validation of the COHS already exists [61]. However, because 5 items were removed from that version [61], we attempted the current validation in which we were able to include the original 27 items with the same factorial structure as the original [19] and the German version [39] of the COHS.…”

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“…The automaticity subscale was of particular interest in the present study. Previous research indicates that this subscale is a valid measure of automaticity 3 (Ersche et al, 2017(Ersche et al, , 2019(Ersche et al, , 2021Wyckmans et al, 2020). No other measures were assessed as moderating variables in this study.…”

“…3 Recent research indicates that the automaticity subscale of the creature of habit scale has excellent psychometric properties (Ersche et al, 2017), it is strongly linked to other self-report measures of impulsivity and compulsion (Ersche et al, 2019), it predicts to the balance between goal-directed behavior and habitual response tendencies in a contingency degradation paradigm (Ersche et al, 2021), it discriminates individuals who have enhanced automatic habitual behaviors such as drug users (Ersche et al, 2020), and it is associated with reduced neural activations in brain structures associated with dysregulation of habits (Ersche et al, 2021). Moreover, the automaticity subscale has been validated in French language before being used in the present research (Wyckmans et al, 2020).…”