fMRI study of cognition, motivation, decision-making, reward, risk, aversion, negative emotion, arousal, craving, impulsivity, and stress in alcohol use disorder

National Institute On Alcohol Abuse And Alcoholism

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Abstract

Emotional Dysregulation - Emotional affects are known to play critical role in development and maintenance of alcohol use disorder. However, the difference in neural substrates of socio-emotional perceptions and decision making in the presence of disorder distractors such as images of alcohol-containing beverages are understudied. Disruption in the interaction of frontal, limbic and temporoparietal networks might be in part the reason for dysregulated processing of emotionally unpleasant stimuli. We recruited patients with AUD and healthy controls for this study. While undergoing an fMRI scan, participants viewed pairs of images consisting of a moral (i.e. emotionally valanced) or neutral cue and an alcohol or neutral distractor. When viewing valanced cues paired with alcohol distractors (compared to neutral distractors), participants had lower neural engagement in the middle temporal gyrus, amygdala, and supramarginal gyrus. Although extension to other disorders with attention modulation dysfunction is needed, these results carry potential societal and clinical benefits by suggesting a novel, leverageable mechanism to reduce antisocial behavior and in providing a cognitive explanation for certain behaviors in substance use that may help combat persistent stigma. The manuscript for this study is under review. Task Development and Response Modeling 1. Prediction Error Task. This task provides a wide variety of information regarding functions such as decision making, reward anticipation, learning and response to the failure of receiving an expected reward, all of which are implicated in AUD. In a collaboration with Dr. Lauren Atlas we are trying to model previously collected data on the Prediction Error Task to determine differences in reversal learning of patients with AUD in contrast to healthy controls. This project has been on hold due to staff transitions in Dr. Atlas's lab. 2. Negative Urgency Task. We have designed and developed a task in which we can study how stress and emotionally charged images can effect negative urgency utilizing a modified version of the delay discounting task. In this task the participants would be asked to select between an immediate reward (alcoholic beverages of choice and monetary equivalent cash) or double the amount in the future under negative conditions mentioned above. In this study we will also utilize functional near infrared spectroscopy to inspect the functional activities of the brain during this condition. Due to staff transitions and COVID-19 healthy outpatient recruitment has not yet started.