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 People who have a strong sense of control believe
their lives are controlled by their own choices rather than the
actions of others, luck or other external factors.
Feeling a lack of control often impairs people's ability to achieve
their goals and can reduce their quality of life and damage their
health, the authors say.
"The most important finding from the study is that simple techniques
can be used to change drinkers' feelings of control — this includes
increasing their feeling that they can control their drinking,"
Miles Cox told Reuters Health in an email.
Cox, from Bangor University in the UK, co-authored the study along
with Zohreh Shamloo of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. They
published their findings in the journal Addictive Behaviors.
"The techniques that we used both improved drinkers' motivation and
decreased their urges to drink alcohol," Cox said.
Those techniques included giving positive feedback along with
reminders to relax and hints on how to complete specific tasks.
For their study, Shamloo and Cox enrolled 106 students from Bangor
University who were light to moderate drinkers.
The participants filled out questionnaires designed to measure their
sense of control over completing upcoming tasks, as well as their
urge to drink alcohol.
The tasks included viewing a series of cards on a computer screen to
determine what the images on the cards had in common and solving
five sets of anagrams.
The researchers randomly assigned participants to a "high sense of
control" group, a "low sense of control" group or a group that
received no intervention while completing the tasks.
Participants in the "high sense of control" group were allowed to
choose their tasks and were given hints on how to complete them. In
addition, they were instructed on how to control their emotions — such as, "Don't worry if you can't find the right answer; staying
calm and relaxed will help you do better." They were also given
positive feedback about their performance.
Participants in the "low sense of control" group didn't get any clues
on how to solve the tasks and received feedback based on their
performance, with no encouragement or discouragement.
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After completing the tasks, participants answered the
questionnaires again and their urge to drink alcohol was reassessed.
The researchers found that at the beginning of the experiment, the
urge to drink was the same across all three groups. But after the
tasks were completed, the "high sense of control" group had a
decreased urge to drink, while the "low sense of control" group had an
increased urge to drink. Members of the no intervention group had no
change.
"Our study was conducted with university students. The same
research should now be conducted with other populations. Additional
research should also be conducted to determine how lasting the
effects are," Cox said.
The researchers only measured the urge to drink during the study — they didn't follow up with participants to see if there was any
change in their consumption of alcohol.
"The results have indicated that changes in people's lifestyle and
helping them to revise their goals . . . have led our participants
to feel more contentment in their lives," Shamloo told Reuters
Health in an email.
Shamloo believes the benefit isn't specific to the urge to drink.
She said positive feelings, along with increases in sense of control
and self-confidence, could help people improve their marital life,
mood, drug cravings and fitness.
 ___
Source: http://bit.ly/1hhHyIe
Addictive Behaviors, online April 2, 2104.
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