Impaired conditional reasoning in alcoholics: a negative impact on social interactions and risky behaviors? (original) (raw)
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Social Cognition Deficits and Associations with Drinking History in Alcoholic Men and Women
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2014
Alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) often are comorbid conditions. Alcoholics, as well as nonalcoholic individuals with ASPD, exhibit behaviors associated with prefrontal brain dysfunction such as increased impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. These behaviors can influence drinking motives and patterns of consumption. Because few studies have investigated the combined association between ASPD and alcoholism on neuropsychological functioning, this study examined the influence of ASPD symptoms and alcoholism on tests sensitive to frontal brain deficits. The participants were 345 men and women. Of them, 144 were abstinent alcoholics (66 with ASPD symptoms), and 201 were nonalcoholic control participants (24 with ASPD symptoms). Performances among the groups were examined with Trails A and B tests, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, the Ruff Figural Fluency Test, and Performance subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Measures of affect also were obtained. Multiple regression analyses showed that alcoholism, specific drinking variables (amount and duration of heavy drinking), and ASPD were significant predictors of frontal system and affective abnormalities. These effects were different for men and women. The findings suggested that the combination of alcoholism and ASPD leads to greater deficits than the sum of each.
Acute effects of alcohol on social and personal decision making
Neuropsychopharmacology
Social drinking is common, but it is unclear how moderate levels of alcohol influence decision making. Most prior studies have focused on adverse long-term effects on cognitive and executive function in people with alcohol use disorders (AUD). Some studies have investigated the acute effects of alcohol on decision making in healthy people, but have predominantly used small samples and focused on a narrow selection of tasks related to personal decision making, e.g., delay or probability discounting. Here, we conducted a large (n = 264), preregistered randomized placebo-controlled study (RCT) using a parallel group design, to systematically assess the acute effects of alcohol on measures of decision making in both personal and social domains. We found a robust effect of a 0.6 g/kg dose of alcohol on both moral judgment and altruistic behavior, but no effects on several measures of risk taking or waiting impulsivity. These findings suggest that alcohol at low to moderate doses selectively moderates decision making in the social domain, and promotes utilitarian decisions over those dictated by rule-based ethical principles (deontological). This is consistent with existing theory that emphasizes the dual roles of shortsighted information processing and salient social cues in shaping decisions made under the influence of alcohol. A better understanding of these effects is important to understand altered social functioning during alcohol intoxication.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2015
Background: Previous studies have shown that alcohol-dependent (AD) individuals have difficulties inferring other people's emotion, understanding humor, and detecting a faux pas. This study aimed at further understanding the nature of such "Theory of Mind" (ToM) difficulties. Methods: A total of 34 recently detoxified AD and 34 paired controls were compared based on 2 nonverbal and video-based false belief tasks. These tasks were designed to identify 3 different types of deficits: (i) a deficit in dealing with the general task demands, (ii) a selective deficit in self-perspective inhibition, and (iii) a deficit in tracking the other person's mental state. (i) and (ii) are compatible with the hypothesis of a prefrontal cortex dysfunction being at the origin of AD individuals' social difficulties, while (iii) would suggest the possible contribution of a dysfunction of the temporo-parietal junction in explaining the social difficulties. Results: Group analyses highlighted that AD individuals performed worse on the 2 false belief tasks than controls. Individual analyses showed, however, that just under half of the AD individuals were impaired compared to controls. Moreover, most of the AD individuals who were impaired showed a deficit in tracking the other person's belief. This deficit was linked to disease-related factors such as illness duration, average alcohol consumption, and craving but not to general reasoning abilities, depression, anxiety, or demographic variables. Conclusions: Just under half of the AD individuals tested showed a ToM deficit, and in most cases, the deficit concerned the tracking of other people's mental states. Such a type of deficit has previously been associated with lesions to the temporo-parietal brain areas, indicating that a prefrontal cortex dysfunction may not be the sole origin of the social cognition deficits observed in alcohol dependence.
Background: Emotional and interpersonal impairments have been widely described in alcohol dependence, and their role in relapse has been clearly established. However, several components of social cognition have not been well explored in this context. Particularly, Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities , which are critical social skills enabling one to understand others' perspectives, and which have been largely investigated in other psychiatric populations, remain to be measured using ecological tasks in individuals with alcohol dependence. This study evaluated ToM abilities in close to real-life situations among alcohol-dependent individuals and differentiated its affective and cognitive subcomponents. Methods: Thirty-two alcohol-dependent individuals (in their third week of abstinence) and 32 matched healthy controls performed the Movie for Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), a multiple-choice task requiring the identification of the emotions, thoughts, and intentions expressed in 45 short video sequences depicting real-life social interactions. Results: Alcohol-dependent individuals showed a global ToM impairment, indexed by a reduced MASC global score. However, exploration of ToM's subcomponents showed that the overall deficit was driven by a massive reduction in affective ToM, with the cognitive subcomponent preserved. Conclusions: Ecological ToM evaluation shows that alcohol dependence is not related to a generalized ToM deficit but rather to dissociation between a preserved cognitive subcomponent and an impaired affective one. These results underscore the importance of ecological measures to precisely investigate each subcomponent of social cognition in alcohol-dependent individuals. They further show that alcohol dependence is closely associated with emotional-affective impairments, pointing to the need to develop rehabilitation programs focusing on these components in clinical settings.
2019
Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. Accordingly, one of the current research objectives is to identify the processes associated with this harmful habit. Although numerous studies have underlined the role of executive and motivational processes, few have explored emotional and interpersonal abilities at early steps of alcohol abuse. The present study evaluated the role of two social cognition processes, namely theory of mind (ability to infer others’ mental states at cognitive and affective levels) and empathy (ability to understand others’ feelings at cognitive and affective levels) in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. Two hundred and two adolescents (13-20 years old) performed a behavioral task evaluating theory of mind and filled in questionnaires measuring personal data, empathy, alcohol consumption (alcohol abuse and specific binge drinking), as well as depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that cognitive and affective empathy were negatively associated with alcohol consumption in youth whereas affective theory of mind was related to specific binge drinking. Importantly, affective theory of mind predicted binge drinking in adolescents, even after controlling for age, gender, and education level. These results emphasized the role of social cognition in early alcohol abuse and showed that, beyond inhibition, interpersonal abilities might precipitate excessive drinking in youth.
Theory of Mind and Executive Functioning in Alcohol Dependence Syndrome
International Journal of Indian Psychology
Title: Theory of mind and executive functioning in alcohol dependence syndrome. Objectives: The objective of study to examine the relationship of the Theory of Mind (TOM) deficit and Executive Functioning difficulties of the Alcohol Dependence Syndrome (ADS). Methods: Forty-five patients of ADS age range between 18 to 35 years participated in the study. All patients selected for study were inpatients of de-addiction ward of the Ranchi Institute of Neuropsychiatry and Allied Sciences (RINPAS), Ranchi. All participants were tested on measures of TOM tasks and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Results: The result findings suggest that the First Order Deception Tasks (FODT) of TOM was significantly correlated with the WCST’s no. of error, percentage of error, non-perseverative error and First Order Deception Tasks (FODT) of Memory with all variables of WCST. Second Order Deception Tasks (FODT) of TOM was significantly correlated with the WCST’s percentage of error, non-perseverative e...
The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas
Cognition, 2015
The hypothetical moral dilemma known as the trolley problem has become a methodological cornerstone in the psychological study of moral reasoning and yet, there remains considerable debate as to the meaning of utilitarian responding in these scenarios. It is unclear whether utilitarian responding results primarily from increased deliberative reasoning capacity or from decreased aversion to harming others. In order to clarify this question, we conducted two field studies to examine the effects of alcohol intoxication on utilitarian responding. Alcohol holds promise in clarifying the above debate because it impairs both social cognition (i.e., empathy) and higher-order executive functioning. Hence, the direction of the association between alcohol and utilitarian vs. non-utilitarian responding should inform the relative importance of both deliberative and social processing systems in influencing utilitarian preference. In two field studies with a combined sample of 103 men and women recruited at two bars in Grenoble, France, participants were presented with a moral dilemma assessing their willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others. Participants' blood alcohol concentrations were found to positively correlate with utilitarian preferences (r = .31, p < .001) suggesting a stronger role for impaired social cognition than intact deliberative reasoning in predicting utilitarian responses in the trolley dilemma. Implications for Greene's dual-process model of moral reasoning are discussed.
Conditional Responding is Impaired in Chronic Alcoholics
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2006
representations or response patterns. We tested this model in 29 individuals with longterm heavy alcohol dependency and compared their performance with that of 20 control subjects. Only individuals without memory impairment, with normal intelligence and normal visual response times were included. We examined word fluency, object alternation, spatial stimulus-response incompatibility, extra-dimensional shift learning and decision-making using the Gambling task. We subtracted the performance in a control condition from that of the executive condition, in order to focus specifically on the executive component of each task. Only the object alternation and incompatibility tasks revealed significant differences between the group of alcoholics and the control group. Moreover, response times in the object alternation task correlated with duration of alcohol dependency. The results do not argue in favor of a specific deficit in decision-making or in shifting between relevant representations. We conclude that long-term alcohol abuse leads to an impairment in conditional responding, provided the response depends on former reactions or the inhibition of pre-potent response patterns.
Journal of studies on alcohol, 1994
The hypothesis that alcohol consumption affects the cognitive functioning of sober social drinkers was investigated in 140 male World War II veterans. All had been tested on an intelligence test during their army service and retested on the same test in 1984-86 and again in this study. On all three occasions heavy lifetime drinkers had the lowest verbal and nonverbal intelligence scores and moderate drinkers, the highest. Performance declined across test occasions for all groups on the nonverbal subtests. On the verbal subtests performance of light and moderate drinkers improved while that of heavy drinkers did not. After controlling for age, education, young adult intelligence and psychological distress, greater lifetime drinking was significantly associated with poorer performance on two of 17 neuropsychological measures and better performance on one measure, while greater current drinking was associated with poorer performance on one measure. The findings appeared to rule out psychological distress and lower intelligence in young adulthood as alternative explanations of cognitive deficits in social drinkers, but they also suggested that, with these factors controlled, social drinking had relatively circumscribed effects on cognitive functions. Reasons why the present findings might underestimate long-term effects of social drinking are discussed. (J. Stud. Alcohol 55: 352-361, 1994) HE CONTINUITY HYPOTHESIS proposes that there is a continuum of effects of alcohol consumption on brain structures and cognitive functions. In its initial form, the hypothesis was limited to an explanation of the variation in effects found in alcoholics (Ryback, 1971). The first indication that this continuum of negative effects might extend into the social drinking range was the demonstration by Parker and Noble (1977) of an inverse relation between performance on cognitive measures and quantity drunk per occasion. Subsequent research has largely supported the extended version of the hypothesis. Negative associations between drinking levels and performance on cognitive tasks have been found for both detoxified alcoholics (