Hester L8 Am I in control of my behavior while intoxicated? Flashcards
Where does psychotic symptoms arise from? (2)
- Psychotic symptoms may be part of an intoxication syndrome, and resolve rapidly with the excretion of the psychotogenic (that is, psychosis-causing) substance from the body.
- Relatively short-lived psychotic symptomatology may be judged to be due to the direct physiological effects of an ingested substance, and the symptoms may persist for a short period (days or weeks) after excretion of the substance.
What is substance-induced psychosis? (2)
- A person’s use of a psychoactive substance, either once or, more commonly, repeatedly, may be associated with the emergence of a psychotic illness, which then continues to have an independent long-term existence even in the absence of ongoing substance use.
- A person with an established psychotic illness may engage in substance abuse, which appears to precipitate psychotic relapses.
What is the relationship between meth use and violent behaviour? (5)
- Acute doses in animals have inconsistently produced violent behaviour, low to moderate doses appear to augment aggressive responses, but the effects are not consistent across species or paradigms
- Chronic methamphetamine exposure in animal studies (Sokolov and colleagues) has consistently demonstrated increased aggression and fighting behavior
- Chronic meth-users self-report problems with violent crime and problems controlling violent behaviour.
- Opinoid withdrawal increases aggression (but so does other types of acute drug withdrawal)
- Some of the mixed results are possibly confounded by the acute effects of meth on increased vigilance and psychomotor behaviour
What evidences shows that meth does not increase violent behaviour? (2)
- Acute doses of dextro-amphetamine, which is an oral medication used to treat narcolepsy and other conditions, show no increases in aggression
- Chronic use (of meth) has been prescribed to successfully treat aggressive behaviour in children with ADHD which is contrary finding to the idea that meth increases aggressive behaviour
What are the 4 pharmacological links between alcohol intoxication and aggression?
- Psychomotor stimulant effects (increased sensation-seeking behaviour)
- Interrupted threat detection
- Alterations of the pain system
- Alterations of cognition
How does alcohol intoxication affect psychomotor stimulant effects?
• Euphoria accompanying intoxication is rewarding, which is accompanied by increases
in nervous system stimulation. So, there is increased BP, HR, respiration.
• The general increase arousal by activation of the ANS means that you get an increased sensations seeking behaviour (approach, confrontational & provocative behaviour)
What is the approach avoidance task (AAT) and how can it reduce someone’s sensitivity to alcohol? (5)
- Approach avoidance task (AAT): used as a measure of someone’s sensitivity to alcohol.
- The results show that alcohol dependent patients are much more likely to show the tendency to approach the alcohol related stimuli
- This paradigm can be used to change someone’s sensitivity to alcohol-related cues in their environment. In this training, if you move the joystick towards the alcohol-related stimuli, it makes it smaller. So it is trying to disassociate the approach on alcohol related behaviour
- Consistent training of this can remove the association between the approach behaviour and alcohol related stimuli, thus reducing sensitivity and automatic action relationship (the tendency).
- There is also some evidence that doing this training over time predicts better success in treatment for the alcohol dependency – although, recent meta-analyses that suggest that the effect is not strong but it is positive nonetheless.
How does alcohol intoxication affect interrupted threat detection? (4)
- Alcohol consumption can alleviate subjective feelings of stress, most likely due to the up-regulation of GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) in the brain
- Intoxication can result in diminishing appropriate levels of stress and or fear
- Animal studies demonstrate that alcohol infrequently heightens aggression in lab animals because they tend to get into proximity of threats that they would normally have avoided
- Hoaken et al 2003: showed that the alcohol-aggression relationship was mediated by the cardiovascular stress response dampening by alcohol.
Study: Influence of subjective intoxication, breath alcohol concentration, and expectancies on alcohol-aggression relation. Is alcohol making someone aggressive or is it another relationship? (5)
- The Taylor Aggression paradigm (TAP) was used where there were high and low provocation conditions in delivering/receiving electric shocks
- Results: Alcohol significantly increased aggressive behaviour in comparison to the placebo, for men but not women
- The effect of alcohol expectancies on aggression in men was rendered nonsignificant when statistically controlling for dispositional aggression (there is no difference in their expectations of the influence of alcohol regardless of their dispositional aggression)
- If you have an aggressive disposition, consuming alcohol as a man will make you exhibit more aggressive behavior. This relationship doesn’t apply for women. People who didn’t have an aggressive disposition, the alcohol didn’t change their aggressive behaviour
- Conclusion: So alcohol isn’t making people more aggressive and you have to have an aggressive disposition in the first place for the relationship occur. (Alcohol will only make you more aggressive if you had a disposition for aggression).
How does alcohol intoxication affect alterations of the pain system? (4)
- In the descending limb of alcohol intoxication pain sensitivity is decreased. Descending limb of alcohol intoxication is when one starts to reach the peak level of blood alcohol concentration and start to tip over that point. In the descending limb of intoxication the analgesia experienced can block the painful aspects of aggression
- In the ascending limb of intoxication human sensitivity to pain increases. The ascending limb of intoxication is as you are reaching peak blood alcohol concentration, before you reach it, sensitivity to pain increases
- The effect of alcohol is therefore thought to be paradoxical
- Subjective experience of pain heightens self-reported irritation, annoyance, anger and aggression towards another, even if the source of pain cannot be attributed to them
How does alcohol intoxication affect alterations of cognition? (2)
The studies investing whether alcohol interferes with cognition have identified a threshold or effective blood alcohol concentration (BAC).
It is called this because it is a threshold at which the majority of subjects displayed a reliable impairment for a given task
How does alcohol intoxication affect processing speed? (4)
- Simple reaction time tasks showed intoxication slowed behavioural response to stimuli
- The flicker-fusion task shows that the point in which subjects who consume alcohol report the flicker to fusion transition is earlier.
- This is attributed to a slowing of neural processing somewhere in the visual processing system between the retina and visual cortex (issue with visual processing
• Speed accuracy tradeoff
– An intoxicated person will purposefully slow down in order to maintain or improve accuracy. Makes it difficult to assess at what stage of processing the intoxication is having an effect.
Processing speed is the conflation of what 3 stages of processing? Which stage does alcohol affect it most?
Perceptual processing, central cortical processing and motor processing.
Central cortical processing stages are most sensitive to intoxication.
How do you compensate for speed-accuracy tradeoff problem to know how alcohol affects which stage of processing?
Using a divided attention task as it assess the ability to perform 2 or more activities at once (e.g. stroop task). Performance of the individual task can often be unimpaired during intoxication, but when required to perform the tasks simultaneously performance decreases dramatically.
How does behavioural control diminish during intoxication?
Behavioural control is thought to be reduced during intoxication because of two sets of countervaling mechanisms for reduced control: inhibitory and activational.
This can be observed using go/no-go and SST:
• influences of inhibitory (no-go or stop trials)
• activational mechanisms (go trials or response speed)
