Secret History: Return of the Black Death Channel 4, 7-8pm In 1348 the Black Death swept through London, killing people within days of the appearance of their first symptoms. Exactly how many died, and why, has long been a mystery. This Secret History documentary follows experts as they pick through the evidence and reveal why the plague killed on such a scale. And they ask, what might be coming next?

Medscape

Assessment in clinical psychology typically relies on global retrospective self-reports collected at research or clinic visits, which are limited by recall bias and are not well suited to address how behavior changes over time and across contexts. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of subjects’ current behaviors and experiences in real time, in subjects’ natural environments. EMA aims to minimize recall bias, maximize ecological validity, and allow study of microprocesses that influence behavior in real-world contexts. EMA studies assess particular events in subjects’ lives or assess subjects at periodic intervals, often by random time sampling, using technologies ranging from written diaries and telephones to electronic diaries and physiological sensors. We discuss the rationale for EMA, EMA designs, methodological and practical issues, and comparisons of EMA and recall data. EMA holds unique promise to advance the science and practice of clinical psychology by shedding ligh...

Ecological Momentary Assessment

Although the measurement of drinking is necessary for assessing and evaluating the treatment of alcohol problems, this key dependent variable has not always been reported in outcome studies.1, 2, 3 Today, the issue is not whether to measure drinking, but how to measure drinking. Concerns about how best to measure drinking patterns and problems date back to at least 1926, when Pearl stressed the importance of separating steady daily drinkers from occasional heavy drinkers.4

Timeline Follow-Back A Technique for Assessing Self-Reported Alcohol Consumption

Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of addiction requires an integration of basic neuroscience with social psychology, experimental psychology, and psychiatry. Addiction is presented as a cycle of spiralling dysregulation of brain reward systems that progressively increases, resulting in compulsive drug use and a loss of control over drug-taking. Sensitization and counteradaptation are hypothesized to contribute to this hedonic homeostatic dysregulation, and the neurobiological mechanisms involved, such as the mesolimbic dopamine system, opioid peptidergic systems, and brain and hormonal stress systems, are beginning to be characterized. This framework provides a realistic approach to identifying the neurobiological factors that produce vulnerability to addiction and to relapse in individuals with a history of addiction.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/278/5335/52.full.pdf

Drug Abuse: Hedonic Homeostatic Dysregulation

Measuring degree of physical dependence to tobacco smoking with reference to individualization of treatment

Summary

Since alcohol research involves both clinical and non-clinical populations, it is important to evaluate drinking assessment methods across different subject populations. Over the past several years, the reliability of the timeline (TL) method of gathering retrospective reports of recent drinking has been evaluated in several studies, and this method has been shown to have generally high reliability with outpatient alcohol abusers, in-patient chronic alcoholics, and normal drinker college students. The present study examined the reliability of the TL method with normal drinkers in the general population. Similar to other populations, the test-retest reliability of male (n=31) and female (n=31) normal drinkers' reports of recent drinking behaviour was found to be generally high. Data gathered by the TL method were also compared to data gathered from the same subjects using a common quantity-frequency (QF) method. Consistent with earlier reports, QF categorization provided a relatively insensitive measure of individual differences in drinking behaviour as compared to TL-derived data. Since the TL method has now been shown to have fairly good reliability for assessing recent drinking across a broad range of drinkers, it can be used for comparative evaluations of drinking behaviour across studies with different subject populations.

Reliability of a timeline method: assessing normal drinkers' reports of recent drinking and a comparative evaluation across several populations.

Reliability of alcohol abusers' self-reports of drinking behavior.

The reliability of the Alcohol Timeline Followback when administered by telephone and by computer

The Timeline Followback (TLFB), a retrospective calendar-based measure of daily substance use, was initially developed to obtain self-reports of alcohol use. Since its inception it has undergone extensive evaluation across diverse populations and is considered the most psychometrically sound self-report measure of drinking. Although the TLFB has been extended to other behaviors, its psychometric evaluation with other addictive behaviors has not been as extensive as for alcohol use. The present study evaluated the test-retest reliability of the TLFB for cocaine, cannabis, and cigarette use for participants recruited from outpatient alcohol and drug treatment programs and the general community across intervals ranging from 30 to 360 days prior to the interview. The dependent measure for cigarette smokers and cannabis users was daily use of cigarettes and joints, respectively, and for cocaine users it was a "Yes" or "No" regarding cocaine use for each day. The TLFB was administered in different formats for different drug types. Different interviewers conducted the two interviews. The TLFB collected highly reliable information about participants' daily use of cocaine, cannabis, and cigarettes from 30, 90, to 360 days prior to the interview. Findings from this study not only suggest that shorter time intervals (e.g., 90 days) can be used with little loss of accuracy, but also add to the growing literature that the TLFB can be used with confidence to collect psychometrically sound information about substance use (i.e., cocaine, cannabis, cigarettes) other than alcohol in treatment- and nontreatment-seeking populations for intervals from ranging up to 12 months prior to the interview.

Mark B. Sobell

Papers

Timeline Follow-Back A Technique for Assessing Self-Reported Alcohol Consumption

Reliability of a timeline method: assessing normal drinkers' reports of recent drinking and a comparative evaluation across several populations.

Reliability of alcohol abusers' self-reports of drinking behavior.

The reliability of the Alcohol Timeline Followback when administered by telephone and by computer

Reliability of the Timeline Followback for cocaine, cannabis, and cigarette use.