“We still need to see how well these effects generalize to other types of stressors that may be more present in day-to-day life. For example, the stressors used in this laboratory story were threat of mild electric shock like is used in rodent research.” “Some to note about this research is that it is based on translational experimental models which help us to understand things like neural mechanisms but this experimental situation may not generalize that well to everyday situations outside of the laboratory. “There are always major caveats in research,” Bradford said. This would increase the generalizability, clinical relevance, and ecological validity of the findings. The researchers note that it will be important for future studies to explore uncertain stressors that more closely resemble stressors in the real world, as opposed to the electric shock stressor. “Furthermore, people who use alcohol to deal with uncertain stressors (like being in public with strangers or going on a blind date) may find alcohol particularly reinforcing, and thus harder to abstain from using.” The findings indicate “that alcohol may not affect responses to all sort of stressors equally, and which types of stress responses alcohol effects may partly determine when alcohol will work best as a stress reliever,” Bradford told PsyPost. By contrast, alcohol’s dampening effect remained the same for uncontrollable versus controllable stressors.
But for both anxiety potentiation and startle potentiation, this dampening effect was significantly greater for uncertain versus certain threats. The findings revealed that, in all stressor scenarios, alcohol significantly dampened subjective anxiety potentiation, startle potentiation, and probe P3 suppression. The researchers specifically focused on the suppression of the P3 ERP response, which served as a measure of emotionally-motivated attention. They also used electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to measure brain responses to the startle probes, also called event-related potentials (ERPs). Six noise probes were also presented throughout the trial, and the researchers measured participants’ eye-blink startle response.
The subjects self-reported their anxiety levels throughout the task. They then participated in a paradigm where they received electric shocks during blocks of trials that were either certain (a cue warned participants of the shock intensity) or uncertain (a cue provided a range of possible shock intensities), and either controllable (participants were told they could lower the intensity of the shocks) or uncontrollable (participants were told they could not control the intensity). Depending on the condition, the participants were either given alcohol, no alcohol, or a placebo. A total of 128 college-aged adults participated in the lab experiment. Bradford and his colleagues devised a study to test whether the certainty and controllability of a stressor modulates alcohol’s effects on reactivity.
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