Alterations In The Processing Of Affective Stimuli In Social Drinkers After Acute Alcohol Consumption--Evidence From Neuroimaging

Although alcohol may affect emotional experience and emotional processing, studies investigating the neural basis of emotional alterations after acute alcohol consumption are few. The present study aimed to examine how acute alcohol consumption affected brain activation pattern while viewing affective pictures (positive, neutral, negative valence picture) in social drinkers.17 healthy volunteers participated in the present study. They underwent three fMRI sessions, i.e., prior alcohol consumption (T1), half an hour after alcohol consumption (T2), and 8 hours after alcohol consumption (T3). During each session, subjects were asked to rate the valence level of each affective picture. Immediately after fMRI sessions, subjects were asked to perform a surprising recognization task in which subjects were asked to recognize pictures they have seen from new ones. The results demonstrated that Social drinkers on T2 showed reduced activation in the orbitofrontal cortex and bilateral hippocampus in response to the affective pictures compared to T1. There is no significant difference between T1 and T3 on brain activation. Furthermore, the performance of recognition of T2 was lower than that of T1 and T3.In summary, our results suggested that acute alcohol consumption attenuate brain activation of social drinkers during affective processing. The study explored the aim of alcohol consumption, and may elucidate the mechanism of alcohol addiction.