Dataset Information

Alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats.

ABSTRACT: Developing a better understanding of how and under what circumstances alcohol affects the emotions, cognitions and neural functions that precede and contribute to dangerous behaviors during intoxication may help to reduce their occurrence. Alcohol intoxication has recently been shown to reduce defensive reactivity and anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. However, alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention to these threats are unknown. Alcohol may disrupt both affective response to and attentional processing of uncertain threats making intoxicated individuals less able to avoid dangerous and costly behaviors. To test this possibility, we examined the effects of a broad range of blood alcohol concentrations on 96 participants' sub-cortically mediated defensive reactivity (startle potentiation), retrospective subjective anxiety (self-report) and cortically assessed emotionally motivated attention (probe P3 event related potential) while they experienced visually cued uncertain and certain location electric shock threat. As predicted, alcohol decreased defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. In a novel finding, alcohol dampened emotionally motivated attention during uncertain but not certain threat. This effect appeared independent of alcohol's effects on defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety. These results suggest that alcohol intoxication dampens processing of uncertain threats while leaving processing of certain threats intact.

SUBMITTER: Bradford DE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5714195 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats.

Bradford Daniel E DE Motschman Courtney A CA Starr Mark J MJ Curtin John J JJ

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20171101 11

Developing a better understanding of how and under what circumstances alcohol affects the emotions, cognitions and neural functions that precede and contribute to dangerous behaviors during intoxication may help to reduce their occurrence. Alcohol intoxication has recently been shown to reduce defensive reactivity and anxiety more during uncertain vs certain threat. However, alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention to these threats are unknown. Alcohol may disrupt both affective resp ...[more]

PMID: 28985425

Similar Datasets

Project description:Despite the scientific consensus, some people still remain skeptical about climate change. In fact, there is a growing partisan divide over the last decade within the United States in the support for climate policies. Given the same climate evidence, why do some people become concerned while others remain unconvinced? Here we propose a motivated attention framework where socio-political motivations shape visual attention to climate evidence, altering perceptions of the evidence and subsequent actions to mitigate climate change. To seek support for this framework, we conducted three experiments. Participants viewed a graph of annual global temperature change while they were eyetracked and estimated the average change. We found that political orientation may bias attention to climate change evidence, altering the perception of the same evidence (Experiment 1). We further examined how attentional biases influence subsequent actions to mitigate climate change. We found that liberals were more likely to sign a climate petition or more willing to donate to an environmental organization than conservatives, and attention guides climate actions in different ways for liberals and conservatives (Experiment 2). To seek causal evidence, we biased attention to different parts of the temperature curve by coloring stronger climate evidence in red or weak climate evidence in red. We found that liberals were more likely to sign the petition or more willing to donate when stronger evidence was in red, but conservatives were less likely to act when stronger evidence was in red (Experiment 3). This suggests that drawing attention to motivationally consistent information increases actions in liberals, but discouraged conservatives. The findings provide initial preliminary evidence for the motivated attention framework, suggesting an attentional divide between liberals and conservatives in the perception of climate evidence. This divide might further reinforce prior beliefs about climate change, creating further polarization. The current study raises a possible attentional mechanism for ideologically motivated reasoning and its impact on basic perceptual processes. It also provides implications for the communication of climate science to different socio-political groups with the goal of mobilizing actions on climate change.

Dataset Information

Alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats.

Publications

Alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets