VISUAL LATERALITY PATTERNS FOR THE PERCEPTION OF EMOTIONAL WORDS IN ALCOHOLIC AND AGING INDIVIDUALS

Objective: This study evaluated hypotheses concerning alcohol-related cerebral dysfunction: (1) alcoholism, like normal chronological aging, has a more detrimental effect upon functions controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain than functions controlled by the left hemisphe re; (2) interhemispheric transfer dysfunction is associated with alcoh olism and aging; and (3) alcoholism and aging act synergistically. Met hod: The participants were 61 right-handed men: 18 young (ages 30 to 4 9 years) and 14 older (50 to 69 years) detoxified abstinent alcoholics and 14 young and 15 older healthy nonalcoholic controls. In a percept ual laterality paradigm, emotional and nonemotional words were present ed to the left or right visual fields, followed by a visual masking st imulus. The participants were asked to judge the emotional valence of each word (positive, negative or neutral) and to respond verbally or m anually (button presses). The dependent variable was the Critical Inte rstimulus Interval needed to escape the backward-masking effect. Resul ts: The alcoholics showed a significant right visual field advantage i n both response mode conditions, whereas the controls did not. In addi tion, older alcoholics showed a selective impairment in processing neg ative words. Conclusions: The findings support the suggestion that alc oholics may have deficient right-hemisphere functioning. Since both th e young and older alcoholic groups showed similar right visual field a dvantages, the idea of synergism between alcoholism and aging with res pect to perceptual asymmetries was not supported.