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.
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Stetter, F., Ackermann, K., Scherer, E. et al. Distraction resulting from disease related words in alcohol-dependent inpatients: a controlled dichotic listening study. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Nuerosci 244, 223–225 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02190402
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02190402