Effects of Alcohol Intoxication on Hostile Attribution Bias and Relational Aggression in Women

Alcohol intoxication is consistently linked to physical and sexual aggression in men, but not women. The lack of evidence supporting the relationship between alcohol and aggression for women could be due to a failure to measure relational aggression (i.e., harmful social manipulation), the form of aggression more commonly employed by women. Further, alcohol intoxication may interfere with the interpretation of social cues, resulting in greater perceived provocation in ambiguous social interactions and increased aggression. The current study examined the relationship between alcohol intoxication and relational aggression in women and the extent to which interpretation of social cues (i.e., hostile attribution bias) explains that relationship. Fifty female college students (Mage = 21.82 years, 76% White) were randomly assigned into an alcohol intoxication condition or a control condition and responded to vignettes depicting aggressive acts perpetrated against the respondent using a modified version of the Social Informational Processing-Attribution and Emotional Response Questionnaire (SIP-AEQ; Coccaro, Noblett, & McCloskey, 2009). Based on data from a pilot study designed to validate the modified SIP-AEQ measure, I isolated two vignettes that were the most likely to elicit relational aggression: the “telling secret” and “disinvited” vignettes. Overall, I found partial support for the primary hypothesis that alcohol intoxication would impact relational aggression. In the “telling secret” vignette, participants in the alcohol condition were significantly more willing to damage the reputation of the transgressor compared to the sober condition. Hostile attribution bias did not significantly vary as a function of alcohol intoxication and hostile attribution bias did not significantly mediate the relationship between alcohol and relational aggression. If replicated, findings suggest that the relationship between alcohol intoxication and aggression is present in women, when considering one specific form of aggression (i.e., relational aggression: damaging the reputation of others)

Adolescents show differential dysfunctions related to Alcohol and Cannabis Use Disorder severity in emotion and executive attention neuro-circuitries

Alcohol and cannabis are two substances that are commonly abused by adolescents in the United States and which, when abused, are associated with negative medical and psychiatric outcomes across the lifespan. These negative psychiatric outcomes may reflect the detrimental impact of substance abuse on neural systems mediating emotion processing and executive attention. However, work indicative of this has mostly been conducted either in animal models or adults with Alcohol and/or Cannabis Use Disorder (AUD/CUD). Little work has been conducted in adolescent patients. In this study, we used the Affective Stroop task to examine the relationship in 82 adolescents between AUD and/or CUD symptom severity and the functional integrity of neural systems mediating emotional processing and executive attention. We found that AUD symptom severity was positively related to amygdala responsiveness to emotional stimuli and negatively related to responsiveness within regions implicated in executive attention and response control (i.e., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus) as a function of task performance. In contrast, CUD symptom severity was unrelated to amygdala responsiveness but positively related to responsiveness within regions including precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and inferior parietal lobule as a function of task performance. These data suggest differential impacts of alcohol and cannabis abuse on the adolescent brain. Keywords: Adolescent, Alcohol Use Disorder, Amygdala, Cannabis Use Disorder, fMRI, Prefrontal corte