Effects of alcohol on person perception: A social cognitive neuroscience approach.

Bartholow, Bruce D.; Pearson, Melanie; Gratton, Gabriele; Fabiani, Monica · 2003 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.4.627

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Summary

This study investigates how acute alcohol consumption affects the cognitive processing of expectancy violations during person perception. The research is motivated by the need to understand the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying alcohol-related social behaviors, such as aggression and risky decision-making. While theories suggest alcohol impairs higher-order cognitive functions like working memory, the precise nature of its effects on encoding and interpreting others' behavior remains unclear. Specifically, the authors examine whether alcohol disrupts "inconsistency resolution," the effortful process of integrating unexpected information with existing beliefs, which typically relies on executive working memory mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The researchers employed a social cognitive neuroscience approach, utilizing event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and a cued recall task. Participants consumed either alcohol or a placebo before engaging in an impression-formation task where they read behavioral statements about targets that were either consistent with or violated previously established expectancies. The study focused on the Late Positive Potential (LPP), an ERP component occurring 300–600 ms after stimulus onset, which indexes working memory updating and correlates with later recall. The design allowed for the simultaneous measurement of neural activity during processing and behavioral performance via memory recall, enabling the authors to distinguish between early automatic processing and later controlled processing. The results demonstrated that expectancy-violating behaviors generally elicited larger LPP amplitudes and were recalled better than expectancy-consistent behaviors. However, these effects were significantly moderated by alcohol consumption and the valence of the initial expectancies. In the placebo group, positive targets performing negative behaviors elicited the largest LPP responses and the best recall. Conversely, in the alcohol groups, negative targets behaving positively elicited the largest LPP and recall responses. This indicates that alcohol did not globally impair working memory but rather shifted the focus of processing based on valence. The findings suggest that alcohol alters the nature of valenced information processing rather than causing a blanket deficit in cognitive function. The authors conclude that alcohol likely enhances reward sensitivity, leading to a bias toward processing reward-congruent information (e.g., positive behavior from negative targets). This supports theories positing that alcohol affects controlled, effortful processes while leaving automatic reactions intact. The study provides empirical evidence linking alcohol’s effects on social behavior to specific disruptions in prefrontal-mediated working memory processes, highlighting the role of incentive-reward systems in alcohol-induced cognitive changes.

Key finding

Alcohol consumption moderates the neural and memory responses to expectancy violations in person perception, shifting the focus toward reward-congruent information rather than globally impairing working memory.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Provenance

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Topics

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• cognitive capacity variation