Binge Drinking, Depression, and Electrocortical Responses to Emotional Images

Binge drinking and depression are highly prevalent, associated with cognitive and affective impairments, and frequently co-occur. Yet little research has examined their joint relations with such processing impairment. The current study examines the relation between symptoms of depression, binge drinking, and the magnitude of early (early posterior negativity, EPN) and later (P3 and late positive potential, LPP) visual processing components of affectively negative, positive, and neutral visual stimuli. Participants included 42 undergraduate students recruited on the basis of depressive symptoms. Results of repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs; Depression X Binge X Emotion X Laterality) showed that binge drinkers exhibited lower LPP amplitudes for negative images, compared with nonbinge drinkers, regardless of depression, consistent with motivational models of alcohol abuse. Otherwise, differences across depressed and nondepressed groups were largest among binge drinkers, including a pattern of stronger early attentional engagement (EPN) to negative and neutral images, but decreased later processing (P3 and LPP) across all emotional categories, consistent with a vigilance-avoidance response pattern.