Publication: Social Salience Attribution in Opioid Use Disorder
Date
2023-12-04
Authors
Kennedy, Gwendolyn
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Abstract
Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) remains a significant health burden across various societal roles. Mothers experiencing OUD demonstrate a disruption in the maternal-child bond, preventing them from adequately caring for their children. In 2016, parental drug use accounted for removing 92,107 children from their homes, and the percentage of children entering foster care resulting from parent opioid use rose from 26% to 34% between 2009-2016. Little research exists on the psychological and neurobiological processes underlying the disruption of fulfilling parental responsibilities. Neurobiological hallmarks of OUD include limbic system neuroadaptations, dysregulation, and changes in the salience network. This leads to drug craving and drug-seeking behavior at the expense of attachment, social cognition, and meta-cognition, with stronger emotional affect. Negative behavioral patterns arise as salience attribution shifts away from natural rewards like social relationships, including the maternal-child bond, toward increased drug seeking and use. In this study, a questionnaire battery of social cognition, mood symptoms, anxiety,
attachment, social networks, and metacognition was employed in a group of mothers with OUD (OUD=15), who were in residential treatment for substance dependence and a group of healthy control mothers (NHC=17). Both groups completed the questionnaire battery and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing the Incentive Cue task (ICT), which consisted of several cue conditions, including photos of opioids and photos of their child. This thesis focused on the response measures to the questionnaire battery and the behavioral responses (response time, RT; and error rate, ER) to the ICT. The results demonstrated group differences in the questionnaire battery related to meta-cognition, social anxiety, and social network size. The experimental group (EG) results indicated a stronger negative metacognitive belief regarding danger and uncontrollability of their thoughts, an attachment style that trends away from anxious and towards avoidant-dismissive, and a significantly smaller social network size. Further, the results showed significant group differences in behavioral measures (RT, ER) in response to the opioid cues, indicating that the EG took less time and had a higher rate of error in completing the ICT. However, there was no difference in the behavioral response in RT and ER to the own child cues. These findings highlight changes in meta-cognition, social anxiety, and social network size associated with OUD. Findings also emphasize the benefit in using cues in varying valence levels with incentive tasks as a valid experimental paradigm to study salience attribution in OUD mothers.
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Keywords
Opioid Use Disorder, Bonding, Social Salience, Addiction Science, Maternal Reflective Functioning