Distraction resulting from disease related words in alcohol-dependent inpatients: a controlled dichotic listening study.
To test whether alcoholics develop an information processing bias towards disease-related stimuli, 30 alcoholic inpatients and 30 controls were administered a dichotic listening task. Three different stimulus types were presented to the right (ignored) channel: neutral words, rare neutral words and alcohol-related words. The hypothesized information processing bias should cause patients to make disproportionally more shadowing errors in the third condition. An ANOVA revealed a significant condition effect (P < 0.001), a tendency towards a group effect (P = 0.09) and a significant interaction (P < 0.01) in the expected direction. There was a marked increase of errors in alcoholics when disease-related stimuli were presented compared to the neutral conditions and to the controls.
Stetter
F
F
Department of Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Germany.
Ackermann
K
K
Scherer
E
E
Schmid
H
H
Straube
E R
ER
Mann
K
K
D000328:Adult; D000437:Alcoholism / Q000523:psychology* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception