People with severe alcohol use disorder may form and recall social memories differently

In new research, people with severe alcohol use disorder tended to have greater difficulty forming new social memories. And, while they had better immediate recall of positive than negative social cues, for longer-term memories, they tended to remember more negative experiences than positive ones.

These findings of a study published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research provide insight into how people with severe alcohol use disorder process social-emotional information, which may help clinicians better target therapeutic treatments.

The study is the first to formally investigate social episodic memory in people with severe alcohol use disorder and suggests that social memory might be a clinically relevant contributor to the social difficulties experienced by people with severe alcohol use disorder. Memory is an important factor in social cognition, which includes, for example, an individual’s ability to recognize emotions, understand others’ perspectives, and perceive and understand social situations.

For the study, researchers recruited 40 people who had been diagnosed with severe alcohol use disorder who were patients in alcohol detoxification clinics in Belgium, and 40 healthy control participants who did not have substance use disorder, and asked them to undergo two distinct memory tasks.

In the first social recognition task, participants were asked to view 32 video clips of individuals displaying angry or happy facial expressions. While watching the videos, participants rated their impressions of each individual’s expression, from very hostile to very friendly. Immediately after seeing the videos, they were shown pictures of the same people, as well as previously unseen ones, with neutral expressions. They were asked whether and how well they remembered seeing each individual and what their expression was.

People with severe alcohol use disorder tended to recognize faces at a lower rate than the control group. Yet, just like healthy control participants, they recognized more faces with happy expressions than angry expressions, suggesting new positive social information is initially better memorized.

The second task tested how well patients could access memories of social interactions. Participants were asked to think of as many specific memories of past positive and negative social experiences as possible in two different phases of three minutes, and then were given unlimited time to describe those memories to the researchers.

People with severe alcohol use disorder recalled markedly more negative interpersonal memories than the control group (there was no difference regarding positive ones). Moreover, contrary to participants without an alcohol use disorder, people with severe alcohol use disorder recalled more negative than positive social memories.

The study authors suggest that the tendency among people with severe alcohol use disorder to recall more negative memories despite positive social information being initially better stored may be due to a greater likelihood of encountering negative social experiences or ruminating about negative experiences.

The study’s results only partially align with non-socially focused memory studies, and should be considered alongside previous research on social attention and other mechanisms of social cognition.