Substance use disorder (SUD) is characterized by behaviors of impaired control, physical dependence, social impairments, and risky use, regardless of the substance used-yet no prior work has predicted these behaviors directly. This study of 3476 adults used 15 judgment variables, derived from a picture rating task, with contextual variables to predict the SUD-defining behaviors, recency of four categories of substances being used, and SUD severity. This study achieved up to 83% accuracy and 0.74 AUC ROC for SUD behavior and moderate-high prediction for substance use with a balanced random forest approach, and 84% accuracy for predicting SUD severity. Judgment variable profiles revealed that participants with higher SUD severity are more risk-seeking, less resilient to losses, have more approach behavior, and have less variance in preference. This study argues that distinct constellations of 15 judgment variables yield a scalable system for addiction assessment, which can support research across a broad range of addictions.
Bari et al. (Tue,) studied this question.