Selective Attention to Emotional and Alcohol-associated Cues in Patients With Alcohol Use Disorder and Healthy Participants

The planned study will investigate the selective attention to emotional and alcohol-related stimuli in alcohol-dependent patients and healthy volunteers.

background Attitudinal shifts in the implicit cognitive processing of alcohol-associated stimuli play a major role in the maintenance of addictive disorders, in the development of alcohol cravings, and ultimately in relapse. There are several experimental methods to study the selective attention to image stimuli. For preliminary studies as well as for the planned study, we opted for the so-called Dotprobe task , in which image pairs (alcohol versus neutral stimulus) are presented. The selective attention can be measured by means of reaction time differences. In addition to alcohol-related stimuli, photos of fearful and happy faces that act as emotional stimuli are also used.

In a preliminary study, the investigators were able to show that not only alcoholics, but also healthy light social drinkers, showed an initial orientation towards alcohol stimuli. The presence of such a shift in attention to alcoholic stimuli, even in healthy individuals, could be a consequence of the processing of alcoholic stimuli as emotional stimuli of increased salience compared to affectively neutral stimuli. There are still no studies that collectively examine selective attention to both emotional and alcohol-associated stimuli. While some studies have shown selective attention to fear stimuli compared to neutral stimuli only in populations with clinically relevant increased anxiety, there are also studies who were able to show that there is selective attention to evolutionarily relevant anxiety even in healthy individuals. In these non-clinical populations, this selective attention appears to be particularly prevalent in subjects with increased anxiety.

Studies using affective positive stimuli such as happy faces showed selective attention to these positive valent stimuli in healthy people compared to neutral stimuli, which was also associated with the current mood . Thus, the selective attention to cheerful faces, for example, in a positive mood was also increased. Emotional processing is relevant in the development and maintenance of addictive diseases as well as in so-called "prolonged withdrawal". Thus, during abstinence among alcoholics, increased anxiety, irritability and dysphoria, the so-called "negative emotional state of withdrawal", appear. In a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, it was shown that when anxious faces were seen, acute alcohol abuse had anxiolytic effects. In a separate study with disgusting images on cigarette packs as an aversive fear stimuli, we found that smokers showed a shift in attention to these disgusting images was associated with relief craving and was also associated with increased anxiety, especially in heavy smokers.

Objective: