Dysfunctional Early Processing of Facial Expressions in Hazardous Drinkers: Evidence from an ERP Study

Hui Zhang,Feng-Chi Yang,John S Y Chan,Yi Jin,Fang Cui

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-13935-7

Hui Zhang, Feng-Chi Yang + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-13935-7

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Abstract

Chronic alcohol intoxication impairs multiple cognitive functions. According to the dual system model (DSM), the development of alcohol dependence (AD) involves the imbalance between the automatic-affective system and the reflective system. However, the cognitive functions of non-AD hazardous drinkers (HDs) remain unclear. The present study aimed to explore how the HDs process facial expressions differently from the healthy subjects. Sixteen HDs and seventeen control subjects (CSs) completed an emotional working memory (WM) task while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We found that there was no significant group difference in behavioral performance between the two groups. In the ERP data, relative to the CSs, the HDs showed delayed latencies of P1 and N170. Moreover, the CSs showed significant differences between the amplitudes of neural/fear and disgust expressions while these differences were insignificant in the HDs. The current results suggest that the main deficits in the processing of facial expression in HDs existed in the early automatic-affective system instead of in the reflective system.

Highlights

In addition to the frontal lobe, chronic alcohol intoxication influences the brain regions associated with emotional processing, such as the limbic circuits including the hippocampus, thalamus, cingulate cortex[12] and the amygdala[13], thereby contributing to the deficits in emotional abilities, such as empathy[14], irony understanding[15], and the decoding of emotional stimuli such as emotional facial expressions[16] or emotional voices[17]
The present study focused on the ERPs elicited by facial expressions in the working memory (WM) task
The aim of the present study was to examine whether the cognitive functions related to emotional WM were disrupted in the hazardous drinkers (HDs)

Summary

Introduction

In addition to the frontal lobe, chronic alcohol intoxication influences the brain regions associated with emotional processing, such as the limbic circuits including the hippocampus, thalamus, cingulate cortex[12] and the amygdala[13], thereby contributing to the deficits in emotional abilities, such as empathy[14], irony understanding[15], and the decoding of emotional stimuli such as emotional facial expressions[16] or emotional voices[17]. The current study is aimed to explore the cognitive functions in HDs. An emotional working memory (WM) task was used to exam how the participants process and encode the emotional stimulus in the WM. P1, a positive wave with the maximal peak occurring at around 100 ms after the stimulus onset, reflecting the response to low-level visual cues during early perceptual stage[21,22], is selected for analysis. P2, a frontally maximal, positive-going component peaking around 200 ms, reflects an implicit, higher-order perceptual process when a stimulus is being compared with mental representations in WM26. P3 is a positive deflection that often occurs between 300 ms to 500 ms after the onset of stimuli This component reflectsattentionalfunctions[28], and is maximal at the posterior sites like CPz and Pz29. Because some early perceptual abnormalities have been reported in the ADs31,32, the HDs may exhibit a reduced amplitudes or longer latencies of P1 or N170

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