Randomized Controlled Trial of an Attention-Based Intervention for Alcohol-Facilitated Intimate Partner Violence

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious social problem that results in millions of male and female victims and over $4 billion in healthcare costs across the country every year. Strikingly high prevalence rates and an array of negative physical and psychological consequences have created a vital need to better understand the mechanisms underlying partner violence perpetration as a means of developing more effective interventions. Alcohol use is related to a greater likelihood of IPV perpetration. The empirically-supported Alcohol Myopia Theory (AMT; Steele & Josephs, 1990) proposes that alcohol increases the probability of aggression by narrowing attention on instigating cues, making it more likely that someone will behave aggressively. However, this attentional pathway for alcohol-facilitated aggression implicated by the AMT and aggression literature represents a significant and untested target for intervention. This study aims to test an AMT-informed intervention targeting the proposed alcohol-aggression mediating pathway. As alcohol's aggression-facilitating effects are proposed to indirectly influence violence through an imposed attentional bias on instigating cues, an intervention specifically designed to modify automatic attention allocation away from provocative stimuli may disrupt the alcohol-IPV relationship. Attention bias modification tasks (ABMTs) have shown promise in altering maladaptive attention biases for threat-cues for those suffering from anxiety by training attention away from the pathology-perpetuating cue over the course of repeated trials. While other AMT-informed interventions attempt to reduce aggression by saturating an inebriate's environment with inhibitory cues (e.g., mirrors, live camera feed to a monitor in the room), an ABMT influences the type of cues toward which an inebriate would be likely to attend. The literature is missing a test of an AMT-informed intervention that is less dependent on the composition of the environment to influence the salience of non-instigating cues. The proposed study will be the first to conduct a CONSORT-compliant randomized-controlled trial of an ABMT that capitalizes on the myopic focus induced by alcohol intoxication to reduce attention toward aggression cues and result in decreased physical IPV in the context of partner provocation.