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Review
. 2021 Mar 22:12:649409.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649409. eCollection 2021.

Minding the Gap: Leveraging Mindfulness to Inform Cue Exposure Treatment for Substance Use Disorders

Christine Vinci  1 , Leslie Sawyer  1   2 , Min-Jeong Yang  1
Affiliations
Review

Minding the Gap: Leveraging Mindfulness to Inform Cue Exposure Treatment for Substance Use Disorders

Christine Vinci et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Despite extinction-based processes demonstrating efficacy in the animal extinction and human anxiety literatures, extinction for substance use disorders (SUD) has shown poor efficacy (i. e., cue exposure treatment [CET]). Reasons for this lack of success include common threats to extinction, such as renewal and reinstatement. In recent decades, research on mindfulness for SUD has flourished, and a key aspect of these mindfulness-based interventions includes teaching individuals to stay present with whatever experience they have, even if unpleasant, without trying to change/escape/avoid it. Similarly, CET teaches individuals to not escape/avoid conditioned responses (e.g., craving) by engaging in drug use behavior. This paper discusses how mindfulness-based research and practices could positively influence CET through future research (e.g., Could mindfulness practice attenuate renewal? Might mindfulness training + CET enhance the ability to extinguish the most salient or motivational cues?), with the long-term goal of improving SUD treatment.

Keywords: cue exposure; extinction; mindfulness; substance use disorder; treatment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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