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How a Habit Becomes an Addiction
Research suggests that only 20–30% of drug users actually descend into addiction — defined as the persistent seeking and taking of drugs even in the face of dire personal consequences. Why are some people who
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What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits
NPR: It’s a tradition as old as New Year’s: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of
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Smoke Signals
More than 2.5 million Americans have died from smoking without ever having picked up a smoking habit. They just happened to live or work with someone who did. That’s according to a report from the
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Is Internet Addiction a Real Thing?
The New Yorker: Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist at Yale and the director of the school’s Program for Research on Impulsivity and Impulse Control Disorders, has been treating addiction for more than two decades. Early in
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Different Roads, Same Reward
When addiction research was in its infancy roughly a century ago, scientists dismissed substance abuse as a mere personality flaw. Today, addiction is widely thought to be due to complex gene–environment interactions influencing brain function
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Individual Variation in Resisting Temptation: Implications for Addiction
At the 2014 APS Annual Convention, APS William James Fellow Terry Robinson discussed how cues associated with rewards, such as food or drugs, can acquire considerable control over motivated behavior, leading to excessive consumption.