title: Distraction resulting from disease related words in alcohol-dependent inpatients: a controlled dichotic listening study.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Stetter
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ackermann
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Scherer
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Schmid
authors.forename: E R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Straube
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mann
mesh_terms: 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