The purpose of this book is to review our state of knowledge about the neurobehavioral and
psychosocial processes involved in behavioral inhibitory processes and to provide an insight
into how these basic research findings may be translated into the practice of drug abuse
prevention interventions. Over the last decade there has been a wealth of information
indicating that substance use disorders do not simply reflect an exaggeration of reward seeking
behavior but that they also represent a dysfunction of behavioral inhibitory processes that
are critical in exercising self-control. A number of studies have determined that individuals
with substance use disorders have poor inhibitory control compared to non-abusing individuals.
In addition the fact that the adolescent period is often characterized by a lack of inhibitory
control may be one important reason for the heightened vulnerability for the initiation of drug
use during this time. Controlled experiments utilizing neuroscience techniques in laboratory
animals or neuroimaging techniques in humans have revealed that individual differences in
prefrontal cortical regions may underlie at least in part these differences in inhibitory
control. Although a few excellent journal reviews have been published on the role of inhibitory
deficits in drug abuse there has been relatively little attention paid to the potential
applications of this work for drug abuse prevention. The current book will provide both basic
and applied researchers with an overview of this important health-relevant topic. Since
translational research cuts across multiple disciplines and most readers are not familiar with
all of these disciplines the reading level will be geared to be accessible to graduate
students as well as to faculty and researchers in the field. The book will be organized around
three general themes encased within introductory and concluding chapters. The first theme will
review basic neurobehavioral research findings on inhibition and drug abuse. Chapters in this
theme will emphasize laboratory studies using human volunteers or laboratory animals that
document the latest research implicating a relation between inhibition and drug abuse at both
the neural and behavioral levels of analysis. The second theme will move the topic to at-risk
populations that have impulse control problems including children adolescents and young
adults. The third theme will concentrate on prevention science as it relates to inhibitory
control. Chapters in this theme will be written by experts attempting to develop and improve
prevention interventions by integrating evidence-based knowledge about inhibitory control
processes. In all of the chapters writers will be asked to speculate about innovative
approaches that may be useful for the practice of prevention.
