SynthesisBiological psychiatry2021
Alcohol and Neural Dynamics: A Meta-analysis of Acute Alcohol Effects on Event-Related Brain Potentials.
Synthesis in Biological psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT06687525 (Alcohol and the Social Brain), which is not on this map. Cited by 17 papers.
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.
Alcohol and the Social Brain: An Alcohol-Administration Hyperscanning Study
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acute effects of alcohol on social and personal decision making.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Trial
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Combined With Electroencephalography Analysis Suggest Time-Dependent and Region-Specific Modulation of Cortical Excitability During Acute Alcohol Intoxication.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2026Article
- Exploring neural markers of incentive salience and real-world drinking among individuals with alcohol use disorder.Physiology & behavior · 2026Article
- Objective Assessment in Clinical Psychological Science: Progress in Wearable Alcohol Biosensors.Annual review of clinical psychology · 2026Review
- Mobile Health for Alcohol Use Assessment: Longitudinal Effects of Breathalyzer Self-Monitoring in Everyday Contexts.The American journal of psychiatry · 2026Article
- The impact of alcohol on brain response in social context: A hyperscanning alcohol-administration trial.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- A wearable alcohol biosensor: Exploring the accuracy of transdermal drinking detection.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- Examining social attention as a predictor of problem drinking behavior: A longitudinal study using eye-tracking.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- Enhanced Performance Monitoring as a Transdiagnostic Risk Marker of the Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum: The Role of Disorder Category, Clinical Status, Family Risk, and Anxiety Dimensions.Depression and anxiety · 2025Article
- The Dopamine System in Mediating Alcohol Effects in Humans.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Prefrontal electrophysiological biomarkers and mechanism-based drug effects in a rat model of alcohol addiction.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Impact of pre-trauma recreational drug use on mental health outcomes among survivors of the Israeli Nova Festival terrorist attack.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2024Article
- Neuroimaging Biomarkers in Addiction.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Where to Look? Alcohol, Affect, and Gaze Behavior During a Virtual Social Interaction.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- High-resolution imaging in studies of alcohol effect on prenatal development.Advances in drug and alcohol research · 2023Article
- A scoping review of electroencephalographic (EEG) markers for tracking neurophysiological changes and predicting outcomes in substance use disorder treatment.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Alcohol narrows physical distance between strangers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAn understanding of alcohol's acute neural effects could augment our knowledge of mechanisms underlying alcohol-related cognitive/motor impairment and inform interventions for addiction. Focusing on studies employing event-related brain potential methods, which offer a direct measurement of neural activity in functionally well-characterized brain networks, we present the first meta-analysis to explore acute effects of alcohol on the human brain.
methodsDatabases were searched for randomized laboratory alcohol-administration trials assessing brain activity using event-related potentials. Hedges' g coefficients were pooled using 3-level random-effects meta-regression.
resultsSixty independent randomized controlled trials met inclusion (total N = 2149). Alcohol's effects varied significantly across neural systems, with alcohol leading to reductions in event-related potential components linked with attention (P3b), g = -0.40, 95% CI (-0.50, -0.29), automatic auditory processing (mismatch negativity), g = -0.44, 95% CI (-0.66, -0.22), and performance monitoring (error-related negativity), g = -0.56, 95% CI (-0.79, -0.33). These effects were moderated by alcohol dose, emerging as significant at doses as low as 0.026% blood alcohol concentration and increasing to moderate/large at 0.12%. In contrast, irrespective of dose, relatively small or nonsignificant alcohol effects emerged in other processing domains, including those linked to executive control (N2b responses) and stimulus classification (N2c responses).
conclusionsContrary to traditional conceptualizations of alcohol as a "dirty drug" with broad central nervous system depressant effects, results instead support accounts positing targeted alcohol effects in specific processing domains. By identifying alcohol effects on brain systems involved in performance monitoring and attention, results move toward the identification of mechanisms underlying alcohol-related impairment as well as factors reinforcing addiction.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.