--- title: Study finds that alcoholics process emotion differently in the brain description: Alcoholics' brains may process emotion differently than those of people who don't have a history of alcohol abuse, according to a study published in the... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2009-08-11T21:26:21.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T11:52:47.027Z article:section: Health og:title: Study finds that alcoholics process emotion differently in the brain og:description: Alcoholics' brains may process emotion differently than those of people who don't have a history of alcohol abuse, according to a study published in the... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Study finds that alcoholics process emotion differently in the brain twitter:description: Alcoholics' brains may process emotion differently than those of people who don't have a history of alcohol abuse, according to a study published in the... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Health](/section/health/) # Neurological clues to how alcoholics process emotion by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Aug 11, 2009 9:26 PM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Aug 11, 2009 9:26 PM UTC The number of male veterans under the age of 30 who commit suicide jumped by 44 percent between 2009 and 2011, the most recent year for which data was available, according to numbers released Thursday by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Roughly two young veterans a day commit suicide.Suicide rates for female vets also increased by 11 percent between 2009 and 2011\. The suicide rate among veterans remains well above that for the general population, with roughly 22 former servicemen and women committing suicide every day.The troubling spike in suicide rates among younger vets comes as overall suicide rates for people using the Veterans Health Administration have held relatively steady in recent years. Suicide rates among older veterans decreased 16.1 percent between 1999 and 2010, while the overall population of older U.S. males ages saw a 27.3 percent increase in the rate of suicide over the same period.The leap in rates for the youngest vets has officials especially worried, Stars and Stripes reports. The cause of the increase remains unclear, but officials searching for reasons point to post-traumatic stress disorder, combat injuries and the difficulties young veterans face in re-entering civilian life.“Their rates are astronomically high and climbing,” Jan Kemp, the VA’s National Mental Health Director for Suicide Prevention, told Stars and Stripes. “That’s concerning us.”\[Stars and Stripes\] The number of male veterans under 30 ending their own lives jumps by 44 percent in two years Alcoholics’ brains may process emotion differently than those of people who don’t have a history of alcohol abuse, according to a study published in the November issue of the journal _Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research_. There is ample research analyzing how alcoholics tend to process emotion distinctly and with a range of behaviors—often misinterpreting nonverbal cues expressed in people’s faces, having dampened or flat reactions where others would have strong responses, being prone to impulsivity and a lack of social inhibition, and tending toward aggression, to name some. Yet, understanding the brain processes and regions that drive those behavioral differences is very much a work in progress. For most people, emotions cause the amygdala—the almond-shaped epicenter of emotional processing located deep in the brain—to light up on neuroscientists’ brain scans. But this small study of 15 now abstinent long-term alcoholics compared with 15 control participants with nearly identical backgrounds and characteristics (apart from family histories of alcoholism), reveals just how differently alcoholics process emotion.more In the study, conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital, all 30 participants were shown pictures of people’s faces expressing either happiness, sadness or no emotion. Yet instead of asking what emotion they saw, in one series of exercises researchers asked them to determine whether the faces looked intelligent; in another, they were asked simply to say whether the photos were in color or black and white. The goal was to see if there were any major differences between the alcoholics and the control group in how more complex processing (making a judgment about intellect), might compare with simple, straightforward tasks. While the alcoholics were more likely to deem the emotionless faces intelligent, and to take slightly longer when assessing intellect, “there were not major differences in their performance,” says Ksenija Marinkovic, the study’s lead author and a neuroscientist at the University of California. Yet, when Marinkovic and her colleagues analyzed where in the brain the participants processed the facial expressions as they answered questions, a dramatic difference was quickly evident. “The healthy controls’ \[brains\] were activated by emotional facial expressions as one would predict in the amygdala,” she explains. Among the alcoholics, however, there was very little activity in the same region. “It was blunted.” Instead, in the group with a history of alcohol abuse, the prefrontal cortex showed increased activity, suggesting it may be compensating for the decreased emotional processing in the amygdala. The findings go some way to understanding how, neurologically, alcoholics perceive emotions differently, and possibly help shed light on what drives the dangerous behaviors often characteristic of alcohol abuse. “You can imagine a situation, a bar perhaps, where a person who is a long term alcoholic and is under acute intoxication, would have this deficit in understanding what the other person is saying, and the emotional, facial, nonverbal cues this person is sending and would misinterpret them,” Marinkovic says. Marinkovic’s research may also open the door for further investigation into how alcoholism impacts emotional processing, and even the genetic component of the disease. Previous research has shown, she says, that people who have a family history of alcoholism but do not suffer from the disease themselves, tended to have less activity in the amygdala when facing emotional stimuli compared with control participants. It could be, that instead of resulting from long term alcohol abuse, the dampened activity in the amygdala comes before the disease. “These results would suggest that amygdala hypoactivity, and the emotional dysfunction, may precede alcohol abuse and may be a part of the wider array of social problems,” Marinkovic says. “It may be a vicious cycle.” Study finds that alcoholics process emotion differently in the brain ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/"},"headline":"Neurological clues to how alcoholics process emotion","datePublished":"2009-08-11T21:26:21.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T11:52:47.027Z","description":"Alcoholics' brains may process emotion differently than those of people who don't have a history of alcohol abuse, according to a study published in the...","url":"https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/","keywords":["Alcohol","abuse"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7145185/neurological-clues-to-alcoholism/","name":"Neurological clues to how alcoholics process emotion"}}]}] ```