Effects of acute alcohol consumption on hostile attribution bias towards emotional facial expressions and implicit approach/avoidance tendencies.

BACKGROUND

Research suggests that a greater perception of hostility in social cues increases aggression, and alcohol influences perception of social cues. Taken together, this could explain some instances of alcohol-related aggression. This study investigated whether social drinkers interpret faces as more hostile following acute alcohol compared to placebo, and whether alcohol influences the tendency to approach or avoid emotional facial expressions.

METHODS

Regular non-dependent drinkers (N = 84) participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled experiment. Participants completed two sessions and were tested following an alcoholic drink (0.4 g/kg), and matched placebo. In each session, they completed tasks measuring hostile attribution bias (HAB) towards emotional faces (happy, sad, angry, disgust, surprise, and fear), and approach/avoidance tendencies towards emotional faces (angry, happy, sad and disgust).

RESULTS

Alcohol did not affect global hostility ratings of emotional facial expression (p = 0.342). However, it did increase global hostility ratings of ambiguous emotional faces after alcohol (drink by intensity interaction; p = 0.002). At an emotion-specific level, happy faces were seen as more hostile after alcohol when compared to placebo (p = 0.009; irrespective of emotional intensity). Alcohol did not affect approach/avoidance tendencies when seeing emotional faces following alcohol.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that alcohol increases hostile judgements of ambiguous emotional faces. They also suggest that happy faces are perceived to be more hostile following alcohol. As an increased HAB when processing socially relevant information increases aggressive responding, this increased hostile perception of happy faces following alcohol may increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour.