Emotional Perception and Memory in Alcoholism and Aging

Abstract

The ability to identify and recognize emotional materials was studied in 10 male alcoholic Korsakoff patients, 27 male non-Korsakoff alcoholics, and 31 male nonalcoholic controls, across a wide age range (23 to 77 years). Stimulus materials were presented in two sensory modalities; the materials were photographs of faces expressing one of four emotions (happy, sad, angry, or neutral), and recordings of sentences with emotional intonations or semantic meanings expressing the same four emotions. Results of the experiments showed consistently severe deficits in emotional functions in the Korsakoff patients, but only minor alterations in the non-Korsakoff alcoholics. Older subjects, whether or not they had a history of alcoholism, also exhibited significant deficits on most of the tasks. Results of the study did not provide strong support for the premature aging hypothesis of alcoholism, which suggests that alcoholism accelerates aging, beginning either at the onset of heavy drinking early in adult life, or later in life after the normal manifestations of aging have begun to appear. Results are related to brain mechanisms in emotional perception and memory functions.

Brain Regional Fos Expression Elicited by the Activation of μ- but not δ-Opioid Receptors of the Ventral Tegmental Area: Evidence for an Implication of the Ventral Thalamus in Opiate Reward

“…In rats discriminating between reward-predicting and non-predicting cues, single neurons of the VPM mediate the acquired affective significance of sensory stimuli (termed 'retrospective coding') and predict the value of upcoming reward ('prospective coding') (Komura et al, 2001). It is noteworthy that in humans, VTA opioid receptors, reward and fos protein expression V David et al diencephalic amnesia (ie Korsakoff syndrome) result in a difficulty in assessing the affective component of memories and contexts (Oscar-Berman et al, 1990;Snitz et al, 2002).…”

Aging and the Perception of Emotion: Processing Vocal Expressions Alone and With Faces

“…A small number of studies have investigated how the ability to identify vocal expressions of emotion fares with age. Some studies have compared overall recognition of auditory expressions in young versus older adults, and have found worse recognition in older adults (usually defined as 60þ years), but have not isolated individual emotions (Kiss & Ennis, 2001;Mitchell, 2007;Orbelo, Grim, Talbott, & Ross, 2005;Orbelo, Testa, & Ross, 2003;Oscar-Berman, Hancock, Mildworf, Hutner, & Altman Weber, 1990;Raithel & HielscherFastabend, 2004). Other authors have isolated individual emotions.…”

Alcoholism and judgments of affective stimuli.

“…In older adults (Albert & Knoefel, 1994;Jenike, 1988), as in individuals with alcoholism (Grant & Harford, 1995), affective changes frequently occur, with depression and apathy being common symptoms. Abnormalities in the ability to recognize emotional facial expressions (Calder et al, 2003;Oscar-Berman et al, 1990), and differential activation patterns in response to these expressions (Iidaka et al, 2002), also have been reported in older adults. Thus, an accumulation of evidence appears to suggest the possible involvement of frontal and limbic brain systems in the abnormal processing of facial affect that is seen in alcoholism, as well as in aging.…”