Effects of acute alcohol consumption on processing of perceptual cues of emotional expression

Abstract

Alcohol consumption has been associated with increases in aggressive behaviour. However, experimental evidence of a direct association is equivocal, and mechanisms that may underlie this relationship are poorly understood. One mechanism by which alcohol consumption may increase aggressive behaviour is via alterations in processing of emotional facial cues. We investigated the effects of acute alcohol consumption on sensitivity to facial expressions of emotion. Participants attended three experimental sessions where they consumed an alcoholic drink (0.0, 0.2 or 0.4 g/kg), and completed a psychophysical task to distinguish expressive from neutral faces. The level of emotion in the expressive face varied across trials the threshold at which the expressive face was reliably identified and measured. We observed a significant three-way interaction involving emotion, participant sex and alcohol dose. Male participants showed significantly higher perceptual thresholds for sad facial expressions compared with female participants following consumption of the highest dose of alcohol. Our data indicate sex differences in the processing of facial cues of emotional expression following alcohol consumption. There was no evidence that alcohol altered the processing of angry facial expressions. Future studies should examine effects of alcohol expectancy and investigate the effects of alcohol on the miscategorisation of emotional expressions.

Effects of alcohol consumption and alcohol expectancy on the categorisation of perceptual cues of emotional expression

“…In contrast to the data reported here, our previous study (Attwood et al 2009) found no effect of alcohol on the ability to recognise angry emotional expressions and instead found deficits in the ability of male participants to recognise sad facial expressions. Direct comparisons between the studies are complicated, however, by differences in the tasks.…”

“…The absence of effects of alcohol consumption on the categorisation of angry-happy facial expressions is consistent with our previous findings (Attwood et al 2009), in which alcohol did not affect the processing of happy emotional expressions. Positive emotions are believed to be easier to process than negative emotions, of which there are more variations with a finer degree of perceptual similarity (Adolphs et al 1996).…”

“…More recently, we have examined the effects of acute alcohol consumption on the processing of emotional facial cues, using an adapted psychophysical task in which participants identified which of two simultaneously presented faces (neutral vs. emotional) contained the relevant emotion (Attwood et al 2009). Angry, happy and sad emotional expressions were tested separately.…”

Alcohol acutely enhances decoding of positive emotions and emotional concern for positive stimuli and facilitates the viewing of sexual images

“…Indeed, face emotion recognition can be experimentally influenced by acute alcohol administration. Specifically, alcohol (0.2-0.4 g/kg) was shown to impair the recognition of sad but not happy or angry facial expressions in social drinkers (Attwood and Munafo 2014;Attwood et al 2009b;Craig et al 2009). Better discrimination of happy faces at a low dose (0.14 g/kg) compared with a high dose (0.56 g/kg) of alcohol was also reported (Kano et al 2003).…”

Gender Effects in Alcohol Dependence: An fMRI Pilot Study Examining Affective Processing

“…Preliminary evidence suggests that acute alcohol use may impair basic affective processing skills, with subtle gender differences in alcohol’s acute effects. For example, acute alcohol administration, but not placebo, leads to misidentification of emotional faces, (Attwood et al, 2009a) and males had more difficulty correctly labeling a sad facial emotion compared with females following a high dose of alcohol (Attwood et al, 2009b). Gilman and colleagues (2008) reported that acute alcohol consumption increased activation to fearful stimuli in striatal regions, but attenuated activation in visual and limbic areas.…”