Effects of Disease‐Related Cues in Alcoholic Inpatients: Results of a Controlled “Alcohol Stroop” Study

Abstract

We tested the hypothesis that alcoholics develop a disease-related attentional bias. Therefore, alcohol-related, but task-irrelevant, words should cause a specific perceptual-processing bias. We investigated this by using a special color-naming task. We subjected 40 male alcohol-dependent inpatients and 40 healthy male controls (matched according to age and verbal IQ) to a modified card version of the Stroop color-naming task that consisted of a neutral and an alcohol word condition ("Alcohol Stroop"). Alcoholic inpatients performed significantly poorer than the control group under the critical experimental condition (color-naming of disease-related words), as compared with the noncritical condition (color-naming of neutral words; p = 0.03). Concerning the possible neuropsychological impairment of the patients, no effects could be found on the reaction time of the "Standard Stroop" using only neutral words (i.e., color-naming of incongruent color words administered without time limitation). The information processing bias on the "Alcohol Stroop" thus qualifies as a cognitive process, which is independent from putative neuropsychological deficits of alcoholic patients and might represent an essential feature of alcoholic psychopathology. The "Alcohol Stroop" contributes to the experimental psychopathology of alcoholism.

Stress and Alcohol Cues Exert Conjoint Effects on Go and Stop Signal Responding in Male Problem Drinkers

“…Instead, stress increased a preexisting bias in Go and Stop responding to Alcohol vs Neutral words. Alcohol-related words increase Stroop interference (ie, impede an alternative criterion response) in alcohol-dependent subjects (Stetter et al, 1995;Stormark et al, 2000). Thus, exposure to Alcohol words in the MSST may have involuntarily engaged attention in a way that impaired voluntary execution of the criterion Go response (speeded key press decision).…”

Amphetamine Primes Motivation to Gamble and Gambling-Related Semantic Networks in Problem Gamblers

“…Gambling words were drawn from previous research on cognitive biases in problem gamblers (McCusker and Gettings, 1997) with supplemental items generated based on face validity (eg jackpot). Alcohol words were drawn from previous research on cognitive biases in problem drinkers (Stetter et al, 1995;Zack et al, 1999). Positive Affect items were derived from items on The Profile of Mood States (Shacham, 1983) and the stimulant subscales of the Addiction Research Center Inventory (Haertzen, 1965).…”

IMAGING STUDY: Modulation of brain response to emotional images by alcohol cues in alcohol‐dependent patients

“…This has been reported in individuals with alcohol (Stetter et al 1995;Bauer & Cox 1998;Cox, Yeates & Regan 1999;Stormark et al 2000;Sharma, Albery & Cook 2001;Townshend & Duka 2001;Cox et al 2002;Ryan 2002), cocaine (Rosse et al 1993(Rosse et al , 1997Franken, Kroon & Hendriks 2000a;Franken et al 2000b), opiate (Franken et al 2000b;Lubman et al 2000), marijuana (Field 2005) and nicotine (Gross, Jarvik & Rosenblatt 1993;Johnsen et al 1997;Franken et al 2000b) dependence, as well as among caffeine users (Yeomans et al 2005). Robinson & Berridge (1993) suggest that stimuli associated with drugs of abuse become particularly salient and therefore 'grab attention' more than non-drug-related stimuli.…”