Alcohol’s effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats

Abstract

Developing a better understanding of how and under what circumstances alcohol affects the emotions, cognitions and neural functions that precede and contribute to dangerous behaviors during intoxication may help to reduce their occurrence. Alcohol intoxication has recently been shown to reduce defensive reactivity and anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. However, alcohol’s effects on emotionally motivated attention to these threats are unknown. Alcohol may disrupt both affective response to and attentional processing of uncertain threats making intoxicated individuals less able to avoid dangerous and costly behaviors. To test this possibility, we examined the effects of a broad range of blood alcohol concentrations on 96 participants’ sub-cortically mediated defensive reactivity (startle potentiation), retrospective subjective anxiety (self-report) and cortically assessed emotionally motivated attention (probe P3 event related potential) while they experienced visually cued uncertain and certain location electric shock threat. As predicted, alcohol decreased defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. In a novel finding, alcohol dampened emotionally motivated attention during uncertain but not certain threat. This effect appeared independent of alcohol’s effects on defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety. These results suggest that alcohol intoxication dampens processing of uncertain threats while leaving processing of certain threats intact.

Stress Allostasis in Substance Use Disorders: Promise, Progress, and Emerging Priorities in Clinical Research

“…Furthermore, high rates of relapse during early abstinence co-occur with frequent endogenous and exogenous unpredictability -for example, unpredictable onset and intensity of aversive withdrawal symptoms, uncertainty about abstinence efficacy, unexpected exposure to drug cues, opportunities to use, and changes in social networks. Finally, other research demonstrates that acute alcohol administration provides negative reinforcement selectively during unpredictable (but not predictable) stressors (e.g., Bradford et al 2013Bradford et al , 2017Hefner et al 2013).…”

Increased startle potentiation to unpredictable stressors in alcohol dependence: Possible stress neuroadaptation in humans.

“…For example, the stressors in the current task were temporally unpredictable, but real world stressors may incorporate unpredictability in alternative, often complex ways. For this reason, we have developed alternative laboratory tasks that manipulate how predictable the stressor may be with respect to probability (Hefner & Curtin, 2012), intensity (Bradford et al, 2013), or location (Bradford, Motschman, Starr, & Curtin, 2017). These features (e.g., probabilistic and temporal uncertainty) can be combined to increase stressor unpredictability (Moberg & Curtin, 2009).…”

Preprint: Alcohol's effects during uncertain and uncontrollable stressors in the laboratory

“…Similarly, a programmatic series of experiments in our laboratory has demonstrated that single administrations of moderate doses of alcohol (e.g., dose yielding blood alcohol concentrations; BACs; between 0.08 -0.15%) temporarily reduce startle potentiation during uncertain stressors significantly more than certain stressors (Bradford et al, 2013(Bradford et al, , 2017Hefner et al, 2013;Hefner & Curtin, 2012;Moberg & Curtin, 2009). Furthermore, Kaye et al (2017) have proposed that chronic use of alcohol causes etiologically relevant stress neuroadaptations (see Koob & Volkow, 2010) that manifest as persistent exaggerated reactivity to uncertain stressors in patients with alcohol use disorder.…”

“…As stressors and other emotionally evocative stimuli demand an organism's limited attentional resources (Blanchard et al, 2011;Robinson et al, 2015), the P3 to the benign auditory startle probe is subsequently attenuated (i.e., probe P3 suppression) in the presence of more threatening stimuli such as visual cues signaling threat of shock. We (Bradford, et al, 2017) and others (Nelson et al, 2015) have used probe P3 suppression as "relatively pure index" (Bradley et al, 2006) of emotionally motivated attention in experimental stressor paradigms that also include measurement of startle potentiation." received recent attention, no study to date has tested the effects of a pharmacological manipulation (e.g., alcohol) on responses to uncontrollable and controllable stressors.…”

“…These gaps leave three possibilities, each with unique implications about understanding of the effects of drugs on reactivity to stressors and that reactivity itself: 1) Alcohol's effects on stressor reactivity are limited to stressors that are both uncertain and uncontrollable, suggesting a synergistic process across two stressor dimensions with implications for both the effects of alcohol and how stressor characteristics interact to affect reactivity; 2) Alcohol reduces stressor reactivity more during uncertain (vs. certain) stressors and also more during uncontrollable (vs. controllable) stressors, providing preliminary evidence for either distinct or shared drug-sensitive mechanisms for reactivity to both stressor types; 3) Alcohol selectively affects uncertain stressor reactivity without varying by stressor controllability, providing an important boundary condition on the circumstances in which alcohol dampens stressor reactivity as well as additional evidence that human reactions to stressor certainty and controllability rely on distinct psychological and/or neurological mechanisms (Davis et al, 2010;Maier & Watkins, 2005;Wood et al, 2015). We present here the first attempt to discern between these possibilities by using a novel experimental stressor paradigm to test the effects of a moderate dose of alcohol (target BAC = .08%) on selfreported anxiety (subjective anxiety potentiation), defensive reactivity (startle potentiation), and emotionally motivated attention (suppression of the P3 Event Related Potential response to the startle probe, i.e., probe P3 ERP suppression; see Bradford et al, 2017 for a review of these measures) in a factorial 2 (uncertain, certain) X 2 (uncontrollable, controllable) fully crossed design.…”