Discuss Reasons Why Relapse Occurs in People with Addictive Behaviour

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The cognitive model believes the addiction is a result of faulty thinking; therefore relapse occurs due to an irrational cognitive biased. The individual cannot correctly see that life without the addiction is better, as their faulty cognition is biased to towards the addiction behaviour such as taking a drug. The expectancy theory in particular believes that biased is that the individual expects life with the addiction to be better that life without the addiction, mainly due to the negative withdrawal symptoms. Tate provided evidence for this idea with the study of smokers who were trying to give up. He found that people were much more likely to relapse when they believed withdrawals were going to be negative. Those who were told to expect no negative withdrawals were less likely to relapse as they had a positive expectation. This provides evidence for the key role expectancy has in relapse. However Tate’s experiment can be criticised. The independent group design could have meant, by chance, the group who were told to expect no negative withdraws, were naturally more determined people, thus increasing their chance of giving up anyway. Without a control group we cannot see how many people would have relapsed with no expectations being induced. Furthermore, self report methods were used when reporting withdrawal symptoms, which are subjective and could be influenced by demand characteristics, with people guessing the aim of the study and trying to give answers to help the experimenter. Another cognitive explanation is the self medicated model, which descried relapse as a result of the individual believing without their addiction they cannot cope, focus on a task or feel bored without their addiction to occupy them. For example a smoker may feel too stressed to function properly at work, therefore relapse and continual smoking occurred to reduce these negative

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