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Influence of alcohol on the processing of emotional facial expressions in individuals with social phobia
- Authors:
- STEVENS Stephan, RIST Fred, GERLACH Alexander L.
- Journal article citation:
- British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 48(2), June 2009, pp.125-140.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
Individuals with social phobia are at an increased risk to develop alcohol problems. However, the mechanism responsible for this association is unclear. It has been suggested that alcohol reduces anxiety by impairing initial appraisal of threatening stimuli. Information that is especially threatening, however, may be resistant to such an effect of alcohol. The influence of alcohol on the appraisal of five emotional facial expressions was tested. Forty social phobia patients and 40 controls performed a dot probe task, after drinking either alcohol or orange juice. Stimuli were faces with happy, angry, neutral and also two ambiguous expressions that were formed by blending angry or happy faces and neutral faces. Sober patients showed an attentional bias towards angry faces, indicating preferential processing of threat stimuli. Alcohol significantly reduced this bias. Only in sober participants, this attentional bias correlated with measures of social anxiety. In controls, no biases were observed. Alcohol seems to attenuate the impact of threatening social stimuli on social phobia patients, which may negatively reinforce the consumption of alcohol and at least partially explain the heightened comorbidity with alcohol related problems known from epidemiological studies.
Effects of alcohol on the processing of social threat-related stimuli in socially phobic women
- Authors:
- GERLACH Alexander L., et al
- Journal article citation:
- British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45(3), September 2006, pp.279-295.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
Social phobics are at a higher risk of developing alcohol problems. The mechanism promoting this association is not clear. According to Sayette (1993b), alcohol attenuates anxiety responses by disrupting initial appraisal of threatening stimuli. We used the emotional Stroop test and an implicit memory test to investigate whether alcohol hinders appraisal of social threat words in patients diagnosed with social phobia. Thirty-two women with social phobia (DSM-IV) and 32 female controls performed an emotional Stroop test either after drinking alcohol resulting in a blood alcohol levels (BAL) of 0.6‰ or after drinking a non-alcoholic beverage. The emotional Stroop test contained social anxiety-related and neutral stimuli. Implicit memory for the words presented was tested with a word-stem completion test. Without alcohol, both controls and socially-phobic participants took longer to name the colour of socially-threatening stimuli than of neutral stimuli. Alcohol levelled response latencies to the two stimulus categories only in controls. Socially-phobic participants responded more slowly to social anxiety-related stimuli than to neutral stimuli, irrespective of their BAL. In contrast to controls, social phobics showed an implicit memory bias for social threat words. This bias was attenuated by alcohol. Alcohol disrupts appraisal of social anxiety-related stimuli in controls but not in social phobics; in these it hinders the consolidation of memory. This also suggests that social phobics experience similar anxiety with and without alcohol, but remember this experienced anxiety less precisely. This effect might act as a reinforcer for the use of alcohol for the purpose of self-medication in future situations.