Desire and craving measured using behavioral ratings and brain network topology differ significantly among moderate to heavy alcohol consumers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: "Craving" is a central concept in alcohol research, but the semantic interpretation of craving as a concept varies. Multiple studies that have investigated differences in operational definitions of craving have demonstrated a lack of agreement among them. This study investigated whether moderate to heavy drinkers would rate craving and "desire" for alcohol similarly and explored potential neurobiological differences underpinning feelings of craving and desire. METHODS: Thirty-nine individuals who consumed an average of at least 7 drinks/week for females and 14 drinks/week for males were studied across 3-day periods of their typical alcohol consumption and imposed abstinence. Ratings of desire and craving for alcohol were collected approximately every three hours during waking periods across the two experimental periods (n = 35, 17 males). At the end of each period, participants underwent functional MRI scanning during neutral and alcohol image viewing (n = 39, 17 males) followed by ratings of desire and craving for alcohol (n = 32, 16 males). Survey responses were analyzed using 2-level nested hierarchical modeling, image ratings were compared using a hierarchical mixed-effects regression, and brain networks constructed from fMRI data were assessed with a two-part mixed-effect regression (α = 0.05 in all analyses). RESULTS: Ratings of desire and craving differed significantly from one another in the survey data and in the ratings collected during image viewing. The strength of the desire experience was higher overall than craving, but the fluctuations over time were similar. Results for desire and craving differed on brain network attributes associated with distributed processing and those regional specific within the default mode network. Significant associations were found between ratings of desire and connection strength and between ratings of craving and connection probability. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that the difference between ratings of craving for alcohol and desire for alcohol is not trivial. The different ratings and their association with alcohol consumption or abstinence experiences may have significant biological and clinical implications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".