Day-to-day fluctuations in craving and the value of drugs and food in daily life
Abstract
Craving is a powerful urge for a specific target (e.g., food, drugs) that prompts decisions directed at satisfying craving. While prior laboratory studies suggest craving biases behavior by amplifying target-specific value, the real-world generalizability of this mechanism remains unknown. We validate and extend these findings in a 28-day naturalistic smartphone-enabled study in patients with opioid use disorder (N=67) and community controls (N=49) who reported on their food (savory, sweet) and drug (opioid) urges and willingness-to-pay values. Despite person-level (mean) covariation, food and drug urges fluctuated largely independently within individuals while maintaining target-specific relationships with value. Using dynamics in drug urge and value and computational modeling, we isolated a distinct, ecologically relevant craving “state” tied to drug cue exposure and drug use in daily life. This research shows craving acts on normative valuation processes in real-world decision making and offers a novel approach to infer clinically vulnerable moments for behavior change.
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BibTeX
@misc{grunevski2026daytoday,
title = {{Day-to-day fluctuations in craving and the value of drugs and food in daily life}},
author = {Sergej Grunevski and Emmanuel E. Alvarez and Emma M. Schweitzer and Julia Kong and Sahar Hafezi and Anna B. Konova},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/vfjkd_v3},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vfjkd_v3/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Day-to-day fluctuations in craving and the value of drugs and food in daily life
AU - Sergej Grunevski
AU - Emmanuel E. Alvarez
AU - Emma M. Schweitzer
AU - Julia Kong
AU - Sahar Hafezi
AU - Anna B. Konova
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/vfjkd_v3
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vfjkd_v3/
AB - Craving is a powerful urge for a specific target (e.g., food, drugs) that prompts decisions directed at satisfying craving. While prior laboratory studies suggest craving biases behavior by amplifying target-specific value, the real-world generalizability of this mechanism remains unknown. We validate and extend these findings in a 28-day naturalistic smartphone-enabled study in patients with opioid use disorder (N=67) and community controls (N=49) who reported on their food (savory, sweet) and drug (opioid) urges and willingness-to-pay values. Despite person-level (mean) covariation, food and drug urges fluctuated largely independently within individuals while maintaining target-specific relationships with value. Using dynamics in drug urge and value and computational modeling, we isolated a distinct, ecologically relevant craving “state” tied to drug cue exposure and drug use in daily life. This research shows craving acts on normative valuation processes in real-world decision making and offers a novel approach to infer clinically vulnerable moments for behavior change.
ER -