Transdiagnostic Approaches in Addictions

Addictions are increasingly examined within a broader landscape of emotional, behavioural, interpersonal, and personality-related difficulties, rather than as isolated diagnostic entities. At the same time, disorder-specific and purely categorical models often struggle to capture the heterogeneity within addictive disorders and their co-occurrence with other psychological problems. Transdiagnostic approaches have emerged in response to these challenges by focusing on cross-cutting vulnerabilities and shared maintaining processes that are relevant across different clinical presentations. In the addictions field, this perspective has been used to examine processes such as motivation deficits, urgency and impulsivity, psychological inflexibility, self-control difficulties, maladaptive expectancies and motives, social support deficits, compulsivity, emotion dysregulation, and sleep disturbances. This approach helps connect research across substance-related and behavioural addictions while also addressing their links with broader psychopathology.At the same time, there is increasing recognition that transdiagnostic processes are embedded within, and shaped by, wider contextual and environmental conditions. Experiences such as psychological trauma, social adversity, and relational disruption have been identified as transdiagnostic risk factors cutting across multiple forms of psychopathology, influencing core processes such as emotional regulation, social information processing, and behavioural control. Contemporary research also highlights the role of digitally mediated environments (e.g., social media exposure, feedback dynamics, and comparison processes) in shaping affective and regulatory vulnerabilities relevant to addictive behaviours. We therefore welcome contributions that examine how shared mechanisms interact with contextual exposures across the life course, including studies that integrate individual-level processes with interpersonal and environmental influences in transdiagnostic models of addiction.The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together current evidence on transdiagnostic approaches to substance-related and behavioural addictions, and to examine how these approaches can advance research, assessment, intervention, prevention, and service delivery. We welcome contributions that investigate shared mechanisms involved in the development, maintenance, and treatment of addictive behaviours, as well as their associations with co-occurring emotional, behavioural, interpersonal, and personality-related problems. We are particularly interested in studies that move beyond single-disorder models and explore whether common vulnerabilities or maintaining processes can improve case formulation and treatment planning across diverse addictive presentations. We also welcome studies examining how these vulnerabilities and processes are shaped by developmental trajectories, relational experiences, social inequalities, environmental exposures, and digitally mediated contexts across the life course. We also encourage submissions on transdiagnostic psychological interventions, dimensional and process-based approaches, and implementation science efforts translating these models into real-world addiction services. Submissions adopting public health, ecological, sociocultural, developmental, trauma-informed, or systems-oriented perspectives on transdiagnostic processes are particularly encouraged. By bringing together work from clinical, public health, and applied perspectives, this Research Topic aims to identify shared processes with meaningful explanatory and practical value across both individual and contextual levels of analysis.Suitable themes for manuscripts include, but are not limited to:•Transdiagnostic mechanisms across substance-related and behavioural addictions, including shared etiological and maintaining processes and their interaction with interpersonal, social, and environmental contexts•Transdiagnostic and contextual assessment in addictions, including functional analysis, clinical interview, process-based case formulation, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), outcome monitoring, and transdiagnostic assessment instruments•Candidate shared processes in addictions, including motivation to change, urgency and impulsivity (e.g., delay discounting), reward and punishment sensitivity, self-control, maladaptive expectancies and motives, emotion dysregulation, social support, compulsivity, and related regulatory processes (e.g., sleep disturbance/insomnia)•Addictions in relation to broader psychopathology and dimensional models of psychopathology, including emotional, behavioural, interpersonal, and personality-related difficulties, as well as frameworks such as HiTOP, RDoC-informed approaches, and network models•Transdiagnostic, process-based, and third-wave psychological interventions in addictions•Prevention and early intervention, exploring the application of transdiagnostic approaches across adolescent and adult populations and across diverse social, cultural, and community settings•Implementation science in addiction services, focusing on the translation of transdiagnostic interventions into real-world settings, including practitioner training, feasibility, acceptability, fidelity, and sustainability• Trauma, adversity, relational disruption, and life-course influences in transdiagnostic models of addiction• Public health, ecological, and sociocultural perspectives on transdiagnostic addiction processes• Digitally mediated environments and transdiagnostic vulnerabilities relevant to addictive behaviours• Critical and systems-oriented perspectives on transdiagnostic frameworks in addiction research and practice Topic editors: Ainhoa Coloma-Carmona, Daria Ukhova, Sergio Fernández-Artamendi Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79943/transdiagnostic-approaches-in-addictions