If you think that alcohol makes people more sociable and open to communication, we have to disappoint you a little: alcohol reduces a person's ability to communicate, violating, for example, the interpretation of the interlocutor's facial expressions.
Recent studies have shown that alcohol disrupts the connection between the two parts of the brain responsible for recognizing social cues. According to C. Luan Fang, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the results are still preliminary, but already suggest that this disorder explains the outbursts of aggression and bouts of social isolation in a state of intoxication.
The experiment involved 12 students. Some of whom drank a drink with a high content of ethanol — about 16% (about the same amount found in fortified wine), while the rest drank a soft drink. Then the volunteers tried to determine the emotions of people in the photographs — fear, anger, happiness, or a neutral expression.
Alcohol has been found to impair communication between the tonsils and the orbitofrontal zone, so volunteers who were intoxicated with alcohol had these areas involved in processing socio-emotional information out of sync.
As Professor Fang explains, "This suggests that during acute alcohol intoxication, emotional cues are not properly processed because the amygdala responses are inadequate."
Scientists did this experiment on students who by their own admission suffer from alcohol addiction, so the next stage will involve volunteers who do not drink regularly. The results of the experiment are published in the September issue of the journal Psychopharmacology.
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