The effects of alcohol on the emotional stimuli processing through the investigation of neurophysiological signals

Abstract

[…] Social drinking, for most people, is an inseparable part of every-day life. Alcohol is used and abused for its ability to modify emotional states, and more precisely, to reduce anxiety [1], [2]. It is therefore essential to study the effects of inebriation in healthy, non-dependent individuals, given the frequency of abuse and binge drinking. A better understanding of the neural underpinnings of alcohol consumption could have a number of social implications, including the origin of the inebriation-induced aggressiveness, the tendency to abuse and the driving or work-related hazards [3]. More precisely, this study aimed to answer to the following questions: - How acute alcohol intake affects the human brain responses to affective pictures? - Is the effect of alcohol emotion-specific or is it the same for all kinds of emotion-eliciting images? - Is the brain functional organization at rest modulated by inebriation? - What are the similarities and the differences between the EEG and MEG studies conducted? In a second level, there has been an effort to design the optimal experimental procedure to examine as accurately as possible the multi-factorial issue of inebriation effects on the human brain. Regarding the analysis of the recordings, the standard analysis techniques on sensor levels were first applied, and then, more advanced techniques, such as cortical source estimation and functional connectivity were used to examine whether any additional information is provided. […]