Cognition Health and Society Laboratory (EA 6291), Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France.
Laboratory for Experimental Psychopathology (LEP), Psychological Science Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 2019 Sep;43(9):1978-1985. doi: 10.1111/acer.14151. Epub 2019 Aug 8.
Binge drinking is a harmful pattern of alcohol consumption, associated with cognitive and cerebral impairments. Indeed, various cognitive processes have been identified as disrupted in binge drinking, ranging from perceptive to executive functions, but emotional processes have conversely been little investigated. Particularly, it is unclear to what extent binge drinkers (BD) present difficulties to recognize and categorize the emotions expressed by other individuals. Such an exploration would, however, offer a more comprehensive view of the deficits associated with alcohol-related disorders and potentially involved in the maintenance of this harmful habit.
Fifty-two BD and 42 control participants performed an emotional task assessing the ability to recognize 6 basic emotions (i.e., anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). Accuracy score and detection threshold were collected for each emotion. To explore the extent of emotion recognition difficulties, 2 analyses were conducted: (i) classical repeated measures analyses of variance, to compare groups' performance, and (ii) multiple single-case analyses (i.e., Crawford's t-tests), to determine the percentage of BD presenting genuine emotion recognition deficits. Correlations were also performed between alcohol consumption characteristics and emotional recognition scores.
BD presented reduced performance for the recognition of fear and sadness. Multiple single cases highlighted that these deficits respectively concerned 21.15 and 15.38% of the binge drinking sample, and the relation between binge drinking and reduced sadness detection was supported by correlational analyses.
These findings show that binge drinking is associated with a disrupted processing of emotional stimuli. By identifying heterogeneity in the impairments presented by BD, the present results also underline the usefulness of a combined group and individual Analysis.
狂饮是一种有害的饮酒模式，与认知和大脑损伤有关。事实上，各种认知过程已被确定为在狂饮中受到干扰，从感知到执行功能，但情感过程却很少被研究。特别是，尚不清楚狂饮者（BD）在多大程度上难以识别和分类他人表达的情绪。然而，这种探索将提供一个更全面的视角，了解与酒精相关障碍相关的缺陷，并可能涉及到维持这种有害习惯。
52 名 BD 和 42 名对照参与者进行了一项情绪任务，评估识别 6 种基本情绪（即愤怒、轻蔑、厌恶、恐惧、幸福和悲伤）的能力。为每个情绪收集准确性得分和检测阈值。为了探索情绪识别困难的程度，进行了 2 种分析：（i）经典重复测量方差分析，比较组间表现，和（ii）多个单案例分析（即 Crawford 的 t 检验），以确定存在真正的情绪识别缺陷的 BD 百分比。还对饮酒特征与情绪识别得分之间的相关性进行了分析。
BD 在识别恐惧和悲伤时表现出较低的性能。多个单例突出表明，这些缺陷分别涉及 21.15%和 15.38%的狂饮者样本，且相关性分析支持了狂饮与降低悲伤检测之间的关系。
这些发现表明，狂饮与情绪刺激的处理受到干扰有关。通过识别 BD 表现出的损伤的异质性，本研究结果还强调了组合的群体和个体分析的有用性。
