Stillness in the Storm

An Agent for Consciousness Evolution

Heavy Drinking May Impair Men’s Ability to Recognize Facial Emotions

By Leave a Comment

Spread the love

(Neuroscience News) Alcohol intoxication is linked to impairments in the ability to interpret other people’s facial expressions, especially in men, according to a new study.

Related Why Alcoholism Relapse Is so Common

Source – Neuroscience News

by Staff Writer, August 21st, 2021

The findings may help explain why alcohol use is often associated with harmful interpersonal and social consequences, such as physical aggression, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, or being victimized.

Heavy drinking is known to have the potential to disrupt the recognition of facial expressions, leading to misinterpretation. This may in turn contribute to inappropriate behaviors.

Identifying the social processing mechanisms influenced by alcohol may inform interventions designed to reduce these negative outcomes.

Previous laboratory studies of alcohol use and emotion processing have had mixed findings, however, and the roles of gender and naturalistic settings have not been investigated.

For the study in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, investigators explored the influence of alcohol intoxication on recognizing facial emotions in a real-world setting, involving men and women across a wide range of intoxication levels.

Researchers worked with 114 adults (60% men, 82% White, median age 24) recruited near restaurants and bars in a mid-southern US town over three nights. Participants answered questions on their drinking habits (how often they used alcohol and how many drinks they consumed on a typical occasion).

They took an emotion recognition task on a tablet computer featuring 10 images, each portraying one of five facial emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, or neutrality). Breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) was measured using a breathalyzer.

The researchers used statistical analysis to look for associations between BrAC, emotion recognition scores, and demographic information including gender.

Participants who were more intoxicated were less accurate at identifying facial emotions. Increased intoxication was associated with lower accuracy among men; the decline in accuracy among women was insignificant.

The most accurately identified facial emotion was happiness; the least accurately identified emotion was sadness.

Overall, higher BrAC was linked to worse emotion recognition for the images showing sadness, disgust, and neutrality.

Among men, higher BrAC correlated with worse emotion recognition for sadness, anger, and neutrality.

This shows a man drinking beer
Participants who were more intoxicated were less accurate at identifying facial emotions. Image is in the public domain

The findings support alcohol myopia theory, which describes how intoxication affects the interpretation of social and environmental cues.

Alcohol-induced deficits in processing social information, especially for men, may contribute to aggression and violence. It is possible too that this effect could motivate drinking among people with social anxiety, who may use alcohol to alter perceptions they find threatening.

Women score higher at facial emotion recognition generally, potentially insulating them against this impairing effect of alcohol.

The investigators recommend that future studies examine the behavioral implications of alcohol-impaired facial emotion recognition, and the role of personality and psychological characteristics.

Please consider becoming a $10 a month donor. 

(Donate HERE)

Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?

The news is important to all people because it is where we come to know new things about the world, which leads to the development of more life goals that lead to life wisdom. The news also serves as a social connection tool, as we tend to relate to those who know about and believe the things we do. With the power of an open truth-seeking mind in hand, the individual can grow wise and the collective can prosper.

– Justin

Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools.

Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammatical mistake? Send an email to [email protected], with the error and suggested correction, along with the headline and url. Do you think this article needs an update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.

Source:

https://neurosciencenews.com/alcohol-men-facial-emotions-19168/

DIRECT DONATION

Support our work! (Avoid Big Tech PayPal and Patreon)

Notices and Disclaimers

We need $2000 per month to pay our costs. Help us one time or recurring. (DONATE HERE)

To sign up for RSS updates, paste this link (https://stillnessinthestorm.com/feed/) into the search field of your preferred RSS Reader or Service (such as Feedly or gReader).

Subscribe to Stillness in the Storm Newsletter

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

This website is supported by readers like you.

If you find our work of value, consider making a donation. 

Stillness in the Storm DISCLAIMER: All articles, videos, statements, claims, views and opinions that appear anywhere on this site, whether stated as theories or absolute facts, are always presented by Stillness in the Storm as unverified—and should be personally fact checked and discerned by you, the reader. Any opinions or statements herein presented are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, or agreed to by Stillness, those who work with Stillness, or those who read Stillness. Any belief or conclusion gleaned from content on this site is solely the responsibility of you the reader to substantiate, fact check, and no harm comes to you or those around you. And any actions taken by those who read material on this site is solely the responsibility of the acting party. You are encouraged to think carefully and do your own research. Nothing on this site is meant to be believed without question or personal appraisal.

Content Disclaimer: All content on this site marked with “source – [enter website name and url]” is not owned by Stillness in the Storm. All content on this site that is not originally written, created, or posted as original, is owned by the original content creators, who retain exclusive jurisdiction of all intellectual property rights. Any copyrighted material on this site was shared in good faith, under fair use or creative commons. Any request to remove copyrighted material will be honored, provided proof of ownership is rendered. Send takedown requests to [email protected].

What is our mission? Why do we post what we do?

Our mission here is to curate (share) articles and information that we feel is important for the evolution of consciousness. Most of that information is written or produced by other people and organizations, which means it does not represent our views or opinions as managing staff of Stillness in the Storm. Some of the content is written by one of our writers and is clearly marked accordingly. Just because we share a CNN story that speaks badly about the President doesn’t mean we’re promoting anti-POTUS views. We’re reporting on the fact as it was reported, and that this event is important for us to know so we can better contend with the challenges of gaining freedom and prosperity. Similarly, just because we share a pro/anti-[insert issue or topic] content, such as a pro-second amendment piece or an anti-military video doesn’t mean we endorse what is said. Again, information is shared on this site for the purpose of evolving consciousness. In our opinion, consciousness evolves through the process of accumulating knowledge of the truth and contemplating that knowledge to distill wisdom and improve life by discovering and incorporating holistic values. Thus, sharing information from many different sources, with many different perspectives is the best way to maximize evolution. What’s more, the mastery of mind and discernment doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it is much like the immune system, it needs regular exposure to new things to stay healthy and strong. If you have any questions as to our mission or methods please reach out to us at [email protected].

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.