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

 描述(申请人提供)：亲密伴侣暴力(IPV)是一个严重的社会问题，每年导致数百万男性和女性受害者，全国各地的医疗费用超过40亿美元。令人震惊的高流行率和一系列消极的身体和心理后果导致迫切需要更好地了解伴侣实施暴力的机制，以此作为制定更有效干预措施的一种手段。饮酒与实施IPV的可能性更大有关。经验支持的酒精近视理论(AMT；Steele&Josephs，1990)提出，酒精通过缩小对刺激线索的注意力，使人更有可能表现出攻击性，从而增加攻击性的可能性。然而，AMT和攻击文献所涉及的酒精促进攻击的注意途径是一个重要的和未经检验的干预目标。这项研究的目的是测试针对所提出的酒精攻击中介途径的AMT信息干预。由于酒精的攻击促进作用被认为是通过对煽动线索施加注意偏差来间接影响暴力行为，专门设计的干预措施可能会扰乱酒精与IPV的关系。注意偏差修正任务(ABMT)通过训练人们的注意力远离病理，在重复试验的过程中保持线索，从而改变对焦虑患者的威胁线索的不良适应注意偏差，这方面显示出了希望。虽然其他AMT知情的干预措施试图通过让醉酒者的环境充满抑制性线索(例如，镜子、实时摄像到房间里的监视器)来减少攻击性，但ABMT会影响醉酒者可能参加的线索的类型。这些文献缺少对AMT知情干预的测试，这种干预较少依赖于环境的组成来影响非激励性暗示的显着性。这项拟议的研究将是第一次对ABMT进行符合配偶标准的随机对照试验，该试验利用酒精中毒引起的近视焦点来减少对攻击线索的关注，并导致在伴侣挑衅的背景下物理IPV降低。

 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.