Examining methods to support self-guided attentional bias modification for alcohol consumption in young adults

Participants will be recruited through news posts and advertisements on social media (e.g., Facebook; see attachments). The capacity to decide whether or not to participate will be assumed based upon their responding to the advertisements for participants and by accessing the initial online survey, which will be preceded by a Participation Information Sheet Recruitment material will refer potential participants to a Qualtrics webpage displaying screening questions. Screened participants will then view a detailed Participation Information Sheet that participants will be asked to read and indicate their consent to participate by clicking on a response button before proceeding to the baseline survey items. All participants will receive email reminders to complete online activities and follow up surveys. Baseline survey questions (presented to screened respondents) will include demographic items, Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ; Marks, 1973) and the 7-day version of Timeline Follow Back for alcohol consumption (TLFB; Sobell & Sobell, 1992). Respondents will be asked to reveal their work/study status (ie. working full time, looking for work, full time study, part time study), age (years and months) and gender (ie. male, female, other). The research will use an attentional retraining technique, known as Attentional Bias Modification Training (ABMT), in the context of alcohol consumption. All conditions will be administered a modified dot-probe task (MacLeod et al., 2002), a computer-delivered task commonly used in anxiety, pain and addiction research to implicitly train participants to re-direct attention away from threats to competing neutral cues. In the alcohol version, participants are trained to focus their attention away from alcohol images toward neutral images (e.g. soft drinks). The proposed online training procedure will follow a protocol of eight online sessions over four weeks as used by McGeary et al. (2014) in a home-delivered ABM RCT for young adult heavy drinkers. Each session will follow the same training procedure. Each session takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. Participants in the intervention condition will receive self-guided functional imagery training (FIT) exercises, delivered online in conjunction with the ABM training procedure. Functional imagery training (FIT) is an evidence-based motivational intervention that combines goal-directed mental imagery training with motivational interviewing (MI) techniques designed to support planning and commitment to personal goal achievement. The FIT exercise will be based on Fitz (Kavanagh & Mani, 2018), a self-guided mobile app that follows the manualised protocols established in counsellor-led FIT interventions (Rhodes et al., 2018; Solbrig et al., 2019) to support positive behaviour change. The first session will guide users through a mental imagery exercise. Later sessions will encourage users to use mental imagery to build motivation for their goal of completing training (e.g., “Have you noticed that when you think about something that happened in the past, sometimes it is like you are back there again and seeing things you saw and heard, and doing things all over again?”). Later sessions will encourage users to use mental imagery to build motivation for their goal (e.g., “imagine what would get better…if you made the change”). Each session will involve a reflection followed by a guided audio imagery exercise. Each exercise will take approximately 5 minutes to complete. One FIT exercise will accompany each training session, therefore 8 FIT exercises will be delivered during the overall period of engagement. All participants will be sent a post-trial survey 35 days after commencing their first ABM session. For participants who complete the full regime this will be one week after completing their final session. Participants who explicitly withdraw or do not commence the first ABM session will not be contacted for follow-up. The follow-up survey will contain the seven-day TLFB (similar to the version presented in the baseline survey), a Sentence Completion Task (similar to the baseline survey), and a program engagement survey designed to assess satisfaction with the training program. Program Engagement Survey. Overall satisfaction will be investigated using a five-item instrument adapted from a post trial survey developed by March et al. (2018). Participants in the intervention condition will also be asked several qualitative questions about their experiences of FIT. Additionally, to measure engagement with FIT content, participants in the FIT condition will be asked to rate the vividness of each exercise on a visual analogue scale (0 to 10). All training sessions are self guided, and accessed via the program link. Intervention and measures are delivered online. The online training procedure will follow a protocol of eight online sessions over four weeks. Participants will complete all tasks on their personal computer in a location of their choosing.Participants’ adherence to the ABM training (dependent variable) will be measured by a count of the number of training trials attempted within four weeks (28 days) following the commencement of each participant’s training program.