Brain Responsivity to Emotional Faces Differs in Alcoholic Men and Women

Abstract

Inclusion of women in alcoholism research has shown that gender differences contribute to unique profiles of cognitive, emotional, and neuropsychological dysfunction. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of abstinent long-term alcoholics (21 women [ALCw] and 21 men [ALCm]) and demographically-similar nonalcoholic controls (21 women [NCw] and 21 men [NCm]) to explore how gender and alcoholism interact to influence emotional processing and memory. Participants completed a delayed match-to-sample emotional face memory fMRI task. While the results corroborated reports implicating amygdalar, superior temporal, and cerebellar involvement in emotional processing overall, the alcoholic participants showed hypoactivation of the left intraparietal sulcus to encoding the identity of the emotional face stimuli. The nonalcoholic participants demonstrated more reliable gender differences in neural responses to encoding the identity of the emotional faces than did the alcoholic group, and widespread neural responses to these stimuli were more pronounced in the NCw than in the NCm. By comparison, gender differences among ALC participants were either smaller or in the opposite direction (higher brain activation in ALCm than ALCw). Specifically, Group by Gender interaction effects indicated stronger responses to emotional faces by ALCm than ALCw in the left superior frontal gyrus and the right inferior frontal sulcus, while NCw had stronger responses than NCm. However, this pattern was inconsistent throughout the brain, with results suggesting the reverse direction of gender effects in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex. Together, these findings demonstrated that gender plays a significant role in the profile of functional brain abnormalities observed in alcoholism.