Trial reportPsychopharmacology2013
Processing of facial affect in social drinkers: a dose-response study of alcohol using dynamic emotion expressions.
Trial report in Psychopharmacology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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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
13 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Alcohol's acute effects on emotion recognition and empathy in heavy-drinking young adults.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Emotion perception and online awareness following alcohol-intoxication: investigating possible deficits using the complex audio visual emotion assessment task.Psychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Effects of acute alcohol consumption on emotion recognition in social alcohol drinkers.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2019Trial
- A moderate dose of alcohol selectively reduces empathic accuracy.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Alcohol acutely enhances decoding of positive emotions and emotional concern for positive stimuli and facilitates the viewing of sexual images.Psychopharmacology · 2017Trial
- Effects of alcohol on emotion recognition: An alcohol-administration trial.Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors · 2026Article
- Sex differences in ethanol consumption and drinking despite negative consequences following adolescent social isolation stress in male and female rats.Physiology & behavior · 2023Article
- Does alcohol affect emotional face processing via interoceptive pathways?Drug and alcohol dependence · 2021Article
- Tackling heterogeneity: Individual variability of emotion decoding deficits in severe alcohol use disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2021Article
- Titrating Tipsy Targets: The Neurobiology of Low-Dose Alcohol.Trends in pharmacological sciences · 2017Review
- Drug effects on responses to emotional facial expressions: recent findings.Behavioural pharmacology · 2015Review
- A specific association between facial disgust recognition and estradiol levels in naturally cycling women.PloS one · 2015Article
- Effects of acute alcohol consumption and processing of emotion in faces: Implications for understanding alcohol-related aggression.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2014Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
rationaleStudies of affect recognition can inform our understanding of the interpersonal effects of alcohol and help develop a more complete neuropsychological profile of this drug.
objectivesThe objective of the study was to examine affect recognition in social drinkers using a novel dynamic affect-recognition task, sampling performance across a range of evolutionarily significant target emotions and neutral expressions.
methodsParticipants received 0, 0.4 or 0.8 g/kg alcohol in a double-blind, independent groups design. Relatively naturalistic changes in facial expression-from neutral (mouth open) to increasing intensities of target emotions, as well as neutral (mouth closed)-were simulated using computer-generated dynamic morphs. Accuracy and reaction time were measured and a two-high-threshold model applied to hits and false-alarm data to determine sensitivity and response bias.
resultsWhile there was no effect on the principal emotion expressions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust), compared to those receiving 0.8 g/kg of alcohol and placebo, participants administered with 0.4 g/kg alcohol tended to show an enhanced response bias to neutral expressions. Exploration of this effect suggested an accompanying tendency to misattribute neutrality to sad expressions following the 0.4-g/kg dose.
conclusionsThe 0.4-g/kg alcohol-but not 0.8 g/kg-produced a limited and specific modification in affect recognition evidenced by a neutral response bias and possibly an accompanying tendency to misclassify sad expressions as neutral. In light of previous findings on involuntary negative memory following the 0.4-g/kg dose, we suggest that moderate-but not high-doses of alcohol have a special relevance to emotional processing in social drinkers.
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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.