Alcoholics' selective attention to alcohol stimuli: Automated processing?

Objective: This study investigated alcoholics' selective attention to alcoh ol words in a version of the Stroop color-naming task. Method: Alcoholic su bjects (n = 23) and nonalcoholic control subjects (n = 23) identified the c olor of Stroop versions of alcohol, emotional, neutral and color words. Man ual reaction times (RTs), skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rate (HR) were recorded. Results: Alcoholics showed overall longer RTs than cont rols while both groups were slower in responding to the incongruent color w ords than to the other words. Alcoholics showed longer RTs to both alcohol (1522.7 milliseconds [ms]) and emotional words (1523.7 ms) than to neutral words (1450.8 ms) which suggests that the content of these words interfered with the ability to attend to the color of the words. There was also a neg ative correlation (r = -.41) between RT and response accuracy to alcohol wo rds for the alcoholics, reflecting that the longer time the alcoholics used to respond to the color of the alcohol words, the more incorrect their res ponses were. The alcoholics also showed significantly greater SCRs to alcoh ol words (0.16 mu Siemens) than to any of the other words (ranging from 0.0 4-0.08 mu Siemens), probably reflecting the emotional significance of the a lcohol words. Finally, the alcoholics evidenced smaller HR acceleration to alcohol (1.9 Delta bpm) compared to neutral (2.8 Delta bpm), which could be related to difficulties alcoholics experience in terminating their attenti on to the alcohol words. Conclusions: These findings indicate that it is di fficult for alcoholics to regulate their attention to alcohol stimuli, sugg esting that alcoholics' processing of alcohol information is automated.