Description
- Abstract:
- The relationship between alcohol and emotion is extremely complex. Prolonged heavy alcohol consumption and acute alcohol administration both affect emotional processing in the brain. In this thesis, functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to explore differences in emotional processing between alcoholic patients and healthy controls, and intravenous alcohol is administered in order to investigate the effect of alcohol on the neural correlates of emotion. Consistent with several theories of addiction, alcoholic patients relative to healthy controls demonstrate an increased neural response to negative, fear-inducing visual stimuli, and a decreased response to positive stimuli. This difference can be reduced through the presentation of visual alcohol cues, which may have become conditioned anxiolytic cues to alcoholic patients. Deficits in emotional processing can also be modulated by treatment with the anxiolytic drug LY686017, which appears to decrease the response to negative and increase response to positive cues in patients on active drug relative to those on a placebo treatment. In addition, data suggest that alcoholic patients activate frontal brain structures more so than controls when engaged in cognitive or emotional decision-making tasks, which may be related to inefficiency of frontal brain systems involved in emotional processing. Alcoholic patients may use alcohol to neutralize an increased negative/decreased positive emotional response. Data from an intravenous alcohol challenge with social drinkers indicate that alcohol enhances positive affect via its activity in the mesocorticolimbic brain circuit, and decreases negative affect via its modulation of visual-emotional brain circuits. The experiments in this thesis suggest that alcohol-dependent patients face a reinforcing cycle of emotional disregulation and increased alcohol consumption, which may contribute to the maintenance of alcoholism. This research suggests that emphasis must be placed on treating mood dysregulation when developing new alcoholism therapies.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2008)
Access Conditions
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Citation
Gilman, Jodi Michelle,
"Alcohol, Alcoholism, and the Neural Correlates of Emotion"
(2008).
Neuroscience Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z06M3544
