One Day at a Time.....
"It was an incongruity in our data that caught my eye," said Warren Bickel, the lead author of the study and a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, where he also directs the Addiction Recovery Research Center. "I realized that the people who discounted the future the most - the ones we least expected to be able to recover from addiction - also showed the best outcomes when they received an effective treatment. And the ones who discounted the future the least improved the least."
Bickel realized that a particular signature of behavioral change - called rate dependence - might apply to future discounting as well.
"Rate dependence generally refers to an inverse relationship between people's rates of responding to something at the outset and then again after an intervention," Bickel said. "This phenomenon is believed to be the reason stimulant medications work for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Stimulants that would make most people bounce off the walls actually slow these kids down."