Toward a Phenomenology of Urge to Drink: A Future Prospect for the Cue-reactivity Paradigm

Numerous studies have shown that alcohol-related environmental stimuli (e.g., the sight of alcohol) can produce emotional responses such as craving in regular drinkers, termed cue-reactivity. The cue-reactivity paradigm grew out of the behaviorist tradition with a focus on reinforcement mechanisms. However, subsequent studies have focused on personality traits as predictors of craving and most recently cognitive states associated with craving. We advocate more rigorous process-oriented research to determine why exposure to an alcohol-related stimulus facilitates one's urge to drink. It is argued here that previous research has attempted to delineate the etiology of subjective craving or 'urge to drink' whilst simultaneously neglecting to adequately operationally define the phenomenology of urge to drink states. We try to resolve this issue by advocating the use of a novel retrospective phenomenological assessment instrument that, to date has not been applied within the cue-reactivity paradigm. Finally, we proposed an experiment that uses that novel instrument to phenomenologically map and diagram 'urge to drink' states of consciousness.