No evidence for a reciprocal relationship between daily self-control failures and addictive behavior in a longitudinal study.

Introduction: We all experience occasional self-control failures (SCFs) in our daily lives, where we enact behaviors that stand in conflict with our superordinate or long-term goals. Based on the assumption that SCFs share common underlying mechanisms with addictive disorders, we tested the hypothesis that a generally higher susceptibility to daily SCFs predicts more addictive behavior, or vice versa. Methods: At baseline, 338 individuals (19-27 years, 59% female) from a community sample participated in multi-component assessments. These included among others (1) a clinical interview on addictive behaviors (quantity of use, frequency of use, DSM-5 criteria; n = 338) and (2) ecological momentary assessment of SCFs (n = 329, 97%). At the 3-year and 6 year follow-up, participation rates for both assessment parts were 71% (n = 240) and 50% (n = 170), respectively. Results: Controlling for age, gender, IQ, and baseline addiction level, random-intercept cross-lagged panel models revealed that participants who reported more SCFs also showed pronounced addictive behavior at the between-person level, but we found no evidence of a predictive relationship at the within-person level over time. Discussion: A higher rate of SCFs is associated with more addictive behavior, while there is no evidence of an intraindividual predictive relationship. Novel hypotheses suggested by additional exploratory results are that (1) only addiction-related SCFs in daily life are early markers of an escalation of use and thus for addictive disorders and that (2) an explicit monitoring of SCFs increases self-reflection and thereby promotes the mobilization of cognitive control in response to goal-desire conflicts.

Individuals at increased risk for development of bipolar disorder display structural alterations similar to people with manifest disease.

In psychiatry, there has been a growing focus on identifying at-risk populations. For schizophrenia, these efforts have led to the development of early recognition and intervention measures. Despite a similar disease burden, the populations at risk of bipolar disorder have not been sufficiently characterized. Within the BipoLife consortium, we used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from a multicenter study to assess structural gray matter alterations in N = 263 help-seeking individuals from seven study sites. We defined the risk using the EPIbipolar assessment tool as no-risk, low-risk, and high-risk and used a region-of-interest approach (ROI) based on the results of two large-scale multicenter studies of bipolar disorder by the ENIGMA working group. We detected significant differences in the thickness of the left pars opercularis (Cohen's d = 0.47, p = 0.024) between groups. The cortex was significantly thinner in high-risk individuals compared to those in the no-risk group (p = 0.011). We detected no differences in the hippocampal volume. Exploratory analyses revealed no significant differences in other cortical or subcortical regions. The thinner cortex in help-seeking individuals at risk of bipolar disorder is in line with previous findings in patients with the established disorder and corresponds to the region of the highest effect size in the ENIGMA study of cortical alterations. Structural alterations in prefrontal cortex might be a trait marker of bipolar risk. This is the largest structural MRI study of help-seeking individuals at increased risk of bipolar disorder.