Trial reportJournal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)2012
Alcohol stress response dampening: selective reduction of anxiety in the face of uncertain threat.
Trial report in Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England), 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Frontal midline theta reflects anxiety and cognitive control: meta-analytic evidence.Journal of physiology, ParisPooled it
- Acute orexin antagonism selectively modulates anticipatory anxiety in humans: implications for addiction and anxiety.Translational psychiatry · 2022Trial
- Alcohol's effects on emotionally motivated attention, defensive reactivity and subjective anxiety during uncertain threats.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Normalizing effect of heroin maintenance treatment on stress-induced brain connectivity.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2015Trial
- Alcohol attenuates amygdala-frontal connectivity during processing social signals in heavy social drinkers: a preliminary pharmaco-fMRI study.Psychopharmacology · 2013Trial
- Alcohol stress response dampening during imminent versus distal, uncertain threat.Journal of abnormal psychology · 2013Trial
- Decoding the bidirectional links between alcohol misuse and aggression: toward a unified translational framework.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- The impact of alcohol on brain response in social context: A hyperscanning alcohol-administration trial.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Exploring associations between drinking contexts and alcohol consumption: An analysis of photographs.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2025Article
- More and Less Fear in Serotonin Transporter Knockout Mice.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2025Article
- Altered Effective Connectivity During Threat Anticipation in Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- The impact of alcohol on affiliative verbal behavior: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2024Review
- A narrative review: suicide and suicidal behaviour in older adults.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- When asking 'are you stressed?' is not enough: Hair cortisol, subjective stress, and alcohol use during the first year of the pandemic.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
- A social contextual review of the effects of alcohol on emotion.Pharmacology, biochemistry, and behavior · 2022Article
- Alcohol's effects during uncertain and uncontrollable stressors in the laboratory.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- Childhood Adversity and the Association Between Stress Sensitivity and Problematic Alcohol Use in Adults.Journal of traumatic stress · 2022Article
- Trauma and Alcohol Use Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Women: An Examination of the Stress-Buffering Hypothesis of Social Support.The journal of primary prevention · 2021Article
- Repeated norepinephrine receptor stimulation in the BNST induces sensorimotor gating deficits via corticotropin releasing factor.Neuropharmacology · 2020Article
- Interpersonal trauma exposure and startle reactivity to uncertain threat in individuals with alcohol use disorder.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Problematic alcohol use and stress response dampening (SRD) are intimately interconnected. Recent evidence suggests that alcohol produces selective SRD during uncertain but not certain threat. We systematically varied shock probability in a novel task assessing alcohol SRD during low probable/uncertain threat, while holding temporal precision of threat constant. Intoxicated (0.08% target blood alcohol concentration) and placebo participants completed a cued shock threat task in which probability of shock administration at the offset of brief visual cues varied parametrically. High probability (100%) shock cues represented certain threat as used in earlier research, while lower probability (20% and 60%) shock cues provided novel uncertain threat conditions. Startle potentiation during cues and inter-trial intervals (ITIs) served as the measure of affective response. General linear model analysis indicated that alcohol SRD magnitude increased monotonically as threat uncertainty increased. Alcohol SRD was significantly greater during 20% and 60% shock threat relative to 100% shock threat. Alcohol also significantly reduced startle potentiation during distal threat in shock-free ITIs. Alcohol SRD magnitude during distal/uncertain threat was meaningfully moderated by individual differences in negative affectivity and weekly alcohol consumption. This work advances understanding of which properties of uncertainty are relevant to anxiety and anxiolytic effects of alcohol.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.