Memory Distortions and Anxiety in Alcoholism: A Directed-Forgetting Investigation

Abstract

Alcohol-dependent individuals and healthy social drinkers differ in their physiological, cognitive, and subjective reactivity to alcohol-related stimuli, the mnesic accessibility of alcohol-related concepts, inhibition abilities, or mnesic performance (F. Ryan, 2002; F. Stetter, K. Ackerman, A. Bizer, E. R. Straube, & D. Mann, 1995). The author investigated (a) cognitive inhibition abilities of alcohol-dependent individuals, particularly for alcohol-related words, and (b) the relationship between anxiety and cognitive activation of alcohol-related concepts in alcohol-dependent individuals by using the directed-forgetting paradigm item-by-item and list procedures. The author used a 2 (Alcohol Consumption: alcohol-dependent individuals vs. social drinkers) x 2 (Word Type: neutral vs. alcohol-related) design. Alcohol-dependent individuals had significantly more difficulty than did social drinkers in voluntarily inhibiting alcohol-related verbal stimuli. This effect seems to be general and nonspecific in alcoholism. In alcohol-dependent individuals, a high level of state anxiety was associated with significant difficulties in inhibiting alcohol-related verbal stimuli. Results suggest that anxiety is a key feature in alcoholism, facilitating the activation of alcohol-related concepts in semantic memory.

Disability Associated With Alcohol Abuse and Dependence

“…We were able to locate three articles on higher fatigue levels corresponding to blood alcohol concentration levels (Dawson and Reid, 1997; Maruff et al, 2005; Williamson et al, 2001). Problems in cognitive functioning in AUD were described in multiple studies covering various AUD-related conditions, including intoxication, hangovers, withdrawal states and Korsakoff’s syndrome (Chelune and Parker, 1981; Farr et al, 2005; Kopelman et al, 2009; Labudda et al, 2008; Liraud et al, 1999; Loeber et al, 2009; McKinney and Coyle, 2004; Postma et al, 2006; Rupp et al, 2004; Rupp et al, 2008; Seifert et al, 2003; Todor, 2007; Uekermann et al, 2003). We managed to find only one article clearly describing social functioning in alcohol-dependent individuals (Günther et al, 2007), albeit indicating high levels of disability on this dimension.…”

“…Most of the studies found on anxiety and AUD considered AUD as a secondary or comorbid condition to anxiety disorders, though the attribute of anxiety was the best described of all supplementary attributes for both alcohol abuse and dependence in the literature (Allan, 1995; Blume et al, 2009; Halsband, 2004; Liappas et al, 2003; Olgiati et al, 2007; Saatcioglu et al, 2008; Todor, 2007). Despite the fact that speech impairments are traditionally associated with acute alcohol intoxication we were able to find only three studies describing specific speech impairments in AUD (Hollien et al, 2001; Pisoni and Martin, 1989; Pisoni et al, 1991).…”

Item-method directed forgetting is (usually) impaired in clinical populations: A meta-analysis

“…Such applications have included mood disorders (e.g., Kuehl et al, 2017;Wong & Moulds, 2008;Xie et al, 2018), anxiety and related disorders (e.g., Tolin et al, 2002;McNally et al, 1999), trauma andstress-related disorders (e.g., DePrince &Freyd, 2001;Moulds & Bryant 2002;Moulds & Bryant, 2008), psychosis-related disorders (e.g., Patrick et al, 2015), personality disorders (e.g., Cloitre et al, 1996;Fleck et al, 2005), eating disorders (Tekcan et al, 2008;Woodard, 2004) and substance-abuse disorders (e.g., Fridrici et al, 2014;Todor, 2007). Due to the typical nature of real-world unwanted memories such studies often focus on the control of negative or personally relevant material, which are thought to be more difficult to control even in non-clinical populations (for a meta-analysis, see Hall et al, 2021).…”

The Think/No‐Think Alcohol Task: A New Paradigm for Assessing Memory Suppression in Alcohol‐Related Contexts

“…Recent research suggests that memory suppression may be impaired in several psychiatric conditions, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (Catarino et al., ), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Depue et al., ), or depressive disorders (Joormann et al., ). In the same vein, several studies point to abnormalities in memory control mechanisms of alcohol‐dependent individuals as measured by the direct forgetting procedure (Noël et al., ; Todor, ) and the TNT task (Nemeth et al., ). Specifically, the Nemeth and colleagues ) study observed that, while alcohol‐dependent patients did not differ from healthy controls in their baseline memory abilities, the instruction to inhibit retrieval did not lead to a significant decline of episodic recall in alcoholics, indicating that the capacity to suppress retrieval was impaired in these patients.…”