ABC-training as a new intervention for hazardous alcohol drinking: Two proof-of-principle randomized pilot studies
- 2023
- Oct 21, 2023
- 1 min read
by Pieter Van Dessel, Jamie Cummins, Reinout W. Wiers
Abstract
Background and Aims
ABC-training is a new intervention to encourage health behavior change that targets the automatic activation of adaptive beliefs (i.e. automatic inferences). The aim of this proof-of-principle study was to test the effectiveness of web-based ABC-training to change outcome expectancies of alcohol drinking in a sample of hazardous drinkers.
Intervention and Comparator
ABC-training involved completing an online task that required choosing personally relevant alternative behaviors to drinking alcohol in personally relevant antecedent contexts to attain personally important outcomes. Comparator was control-training, in which participants selected both the alternative behaviors and alcohol drinking an equal number of times. Training was completed at baseline, after 3 days and after 1 week.
Conclusions
ABC-training may change outcome expectancies of alcohol consumption, but testing of clinically relevant effects in other samples is warranted.
