Inhibiting Irrelevant Information in Adult Children of People With Alcoholism

Abstract

Adult children of people with alcoholism (ACAs; n = 21) and adults with no family history of alcoholism (non-ACAs; n = 24) completed a task designed to test inhibitory ability using a reaction-time based negative priming task. Although participants in the ACA group responded more slowly overall, they did not differ on this task as compared with participants in the non-ACA group. This pattern of results suggests that inhibitory ability is preserved in ACAs, at least within the context of the current negative priming task. The authors discuss study limitations and inconsistencies in the ACA literature.

Separating intentional inhibition of prepotent responses and resistance to proactive interference in alcohol-dependent individuals

“…MacLeod and Dodd, 2003). Taken together, these findings suggest that alcohol dependence is not associated with impairments in automatic response inhibition whereas the capacity to intentionally suppress prepotent response does allow discriminating between individuals at risk or not to become dependent to alcohol (Ferraro et al, 2007), between people under influence of alcohol or not (Abroms et al, 2006), and between alcohol-dependent and non-alcohol dependent individuals.…”

“…Indeed, the ability of a subject to execute a saccade in the presence of an irrelevant, interfering stimulus (distractor), which required its reflexive suppression (e.g., Reingold and Stampe, 2002) appears to be uncompromised by moderate dose of alcohol (Abroms et al, 2006). Also, adult children of people with alcoholism did not differ from controls on a reaction-time based negative priming task (Ferraro et al, 2007), which supposedly measures automatic response inhibition (Nigg, 2000;but see e.g. MacLeod and Dodd, 2003).…”