Abstract
Background
Alcohol misuse is associated with externalizing behaviors, including rule-breaking.
Studies have implicated altered reward processing in externalizing behaviors and alcohol
misuse. Here, we investigated whether reward or punishment reactivity more significantly
influences alcohol use severity and rule-breaking behavior in young adult drinkers.
Methods
We curated the data of the Human Connectome Project and identified 181 binge (132
men) and 288 non-binge (97 men) drinkers performing a gambling task during brain imaging.
Alcohol use severity was quantified by the first principal component (PC1) of principal
component analysis of all drinking measures. We analyzed the imaging data with published
routines and evaluated the results at a corrected threshold. We examined the inter-relationship
between imaging and clinical metrics with mediation and path analyses.
Results
Bingers vs. non-bingers showed more severe rule-breaking behavior and responded significantly
faster during post-loss than post-win trials. Bingers vs. non-bingers demonstrated
greater inferior/middle frontal gyrus (IFG/MFG) and cerebellum activations in loss-predominating
blocks but no differences in regional responses to win-predominating blocks, relative
to an inter-block baseline. The right caudate body showed loss reactivity in positive
correlation with rule-breaking score. No regional responses to wins were significantly
correlated with rule-breaking score. Mediation and path analysis demonstrated significant
models with IFG/MFG and caudate reactivity to loss inter-relating rule-breaking and
alcohol use severity.
Conclusions
Punishment rather than reward reactivity is associated with alcohol use severity and
rule-breaking in young adults. The findings highlight the roles of negative emotions
in psychological models of externalizing behavior and alcohol misuse.
Keywords
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Article Info
Publication History
Accepted:
June 2,
2022
Received in revised form:
May 29,
2022
Received:
February 21,
2022
Publication stage
In Press Journal Pre-ProofFootnotes
Funding Support and Acknowledgement
The current study is supported by NIH grants DA051922 (C-SRL) and National Natural Science Foundation of China U20A20388 (XT). Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.
Competing interests
The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc on behalf of Society of Biological Psychiatry.
