Dataset Information

Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Individuals in treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) display deficits across a broad range of cognitive processes. Disruptions in affective processing are understudied, but may be particularly important for interpersonal functioning and post-treatment adaptation. In particular, the role of sex in AUD-associated emotion processing deficits remains largely unaddressed and was a focus of the current investigation.

Methods

Fifty-six treatment seekers with AUD and 54 healthy community controls (N = 110) were administered an emotional face discrimination task. Non-affective tasks included a sex-discrimination task and two brief measures of executive functioning. Two measures of interpersonal function were included.

Results

Emotion processing deficits were evident among women with AUD relative to other groups. This sex-contingent relationship was not observed in measures of executive function, sex-discrimination or interpersonal problems, although individuals with AUD performed more poorly on these measures.

Conclusions

Results were consistent with extant literatures examining cognitive, affective and interpersonal functioning among individuals with AUD, and provided novel evidence of vulnerability to alcohol-associated deficits in emotion processing among women. While similar sex-contingent effects were not apparent among other measures, results support modest interrelationships, specifically including the import of emotion processing to interpersonal functioning in AUD. These data offer guidance for further systematic investigation and highlight important considerations for future relapse-prevention and recovery-facilitation efforts.

SUBMITTER: Lewis B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6671392 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning.

Lewis Ben B Price Julianne L JL Garcia Christian C CC Nixon Sara Jo SJ

Alcohol and alcoholism (Oxford, Oxfordshire) 20190701 4

<h4>Background</h4>Individuals in treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) display deficits across a broad range of cognitive processes. Disruptions in affective processing are understudied, but may be particularly important for interpersonal functioning and post-treatment adaptation. In particular, the role of sex in AUD-associated emotion processing deficits remains largely unaddressed and was a focus of the current investigation.<h4>Methods</h4>Fifty-six treatment seekers with AUD and 54 heal ...[more]

PMID: 30796771

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Project description:BackgroundAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social cognition. The biological basis of deficits in social cognition in ASD, and their difficulty in processing emotional face information in particular, remains unclear. Atypical communication within and between brain regions has been reported in ASD. Interregional phase-locking is a neurophysiological mechanism mediating communication among brain areas and is understood to support cognitive functions. In the present study we investigated interregional magnetoencephalographic phase synchronization during the perception of emotional faces in adolescents with ASD.MethodsA total of 22 adolescents with ASD (18 males, mean age =14.2 ± 1.15 years, 22 right-handed) with mild to no cognitive delay and 17 healthy controls (14 males, mean age =14.4 ± 0.33 years, 16 right-handed) performed an implicit emotional processing task requiring perception of happy, angry and neutral faces while we recorded neuromagnetic signals. The faces were presented rapidly (80 ms duration) to the left or right of a central fixation cross and participants responded to a scrambled pattern that was presented concurrently on the opposite side of the fixation point. Task-dependent interregional phase-locking was calculated among source-resolved brain regions.ResultsTask-dependent increases in interregional beta synchronization were observed. Beta-band interregional phase-locking in adolescents with ASD was reduced, relative to controls, during the perception of angry faces in a distributed network involving the right fusiform gyrus and insula. No significant group differences were found for happy or neutral faces, or other analyzed frequency ranges. Significant reductions in task-dependent beta connectivity strength, clustering and eigenvector centrality (all P <0.001) in the right insula were found in adolescents with ASD, relative to controls.ConclusionsReduced beta synchronization may reflect inadequate recruitment of task-relevant networks during emotional face processing in ASD. The right insula, specifically, was a hub of reduced functional connectivity and may play a prominent role in the inability to effectively extract emotional information from faces. These findings suggest that functional disconnection in brain networks mediating emotional processes may contribute to deficits in social cognition in this population.

Project description:People at risk of developing clinical depression exhibit attentional biases for emotional faces. To clarify whether such effects occur at an early, automatic, or at a late, deliberate processing stage of emotional processing, the present study used high-density electroencephalography during both covert and overt processing of sad, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions in healthy participants with high dysphoria (n = 16) and with low dysphoria (n = 19). A state-of-the-art non-parametric permutation-based statistical approach was then used to explore the effects of emotion, attentional task demands, and group. Behaviorally, participants responded faster and more accurately when overtly categorizing happy faces and they were slower and less accurate when categorizing sad and fearful faces, independent of the dysphoria group. Electrophysiologically, in an early time-window (N170: 140-180 ms), there was a significant main effect for the dysphoria group, with greater negative voltage for the high vs. low dysphoria group over the left-sided temporo-occipital scalp. Furthermore, there was a significant group by emotional interaction, with the high dysphoria group displaying greater negative amplitude N170 for happy than fearful faces. Attentional task demands did not influence such early effects. In contrast, in an intermediate time-window (EPN: 200-400 ms) and in a late time-window (LPP: 500-750 ms) there were no significant main effects nor interactions involving the dysphoria Group. The LPP results paralleled the behavioral results, with greater LPP voltages for sad and fearful relative to happy faces only in the overt task, but similarly so in the two dysphoria groups. This study provides novel evidence that alterations in face processing in dysphoric individuals can be seen at the early stages of face perception, as indexed by the N170, although not in the form of a typical pattern of mood-congruent attentional bias. In contrast, intermediate (EPN) and late (LPP) stages of emotional face processing appear unaffected by dysphoria. Importantly, the early dysphoria effect appears to be independent of the top-down allocation of attention, further supporting the idea that dysphoria may influence a stage of automatic emotional appraisal. It is proposed that it may be a consequence of a shift from holistic to feature-based processing of facial expressions, or may be due to the influence of negative schemas acting as a negative context for emotional facial processing.

Dataset Information

Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning.

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