Validity Concerns About the Heartbeat Counting Task Extend to Alcohol Use disorder: Evidence From Subclinical and...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Interoception is theorized to influence addictive disorders.
• The classical heartbeat counting task (HCT) is prone to estimation biases.
• An adapted HCT aims to mitigate these biases by focusing solely on felt heartbeats.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the validity of classical and adapted HCT versions in individuals with alcohol use disorders.
• To compare interoceptive accuracy between patients with severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD), binge drinkers (BD), and healthy controls (HC).
• To explore the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and psychological variables.

Main Methods:

• Recruited clinical (SAUD) and subclinical (BD) samples with matched healthy controls (HC).
• Administered classical HCT, adapted HCT, and a time estimation task.
• Assessed psychological variables including alexithymia, anxiety, childhood trauma, depression, and emotion regulation.

Main Results:

• Adapted HCT scores were consistently lower than classical HCT scores across all groups.
• Patients with SAUD, but not BD, exhibited lower HCT scores than their matched HC.
• No significant correlations were found between HCT scores and psychological constructs.
• Heartbeat reports in classical HCT correlated with time estimation, suggesting strategy use.

Conclusions:

• The adapted HCT shows significantly reduced performance, raising concerns about its validity.
• The association between HCT and time estimation performance indicates potential strategy contamination.
• The lack of expected correlations with psychological variables further questions the HCT's utility in measuring interoceptive accuracy in problematic alcohol consumption.