The effects of chronic cannabis use on cross-modal emotion recognition

Sean Nabile Noudali

doi:10.7273/000004264

A critical component of social interaction is perceiving and understanding emotional expression. Deficits in recognizing emotion are associated with mental illness, addiction, and interpersonal problems. Emotion is most easily and accurately understood when perceived through multiple modalities (e.g., auditory and visual versus visual alone), and substances of abuse can affect emotion recognition (ER) across sensory channels. Cannabis use is associated with impairment of facial ER. To date, no studies have examined how cannabis use affects auditory and cross-modal ER, suggesting that prior work has not fully evaluated the scope of ER deficits. I aimed to replicate the findings that cannabis use impairs facial ER and to extend these findings by examining if cannabis users have impaired auditory and cross-modal ER. I also aimed to determine if deficits in ER are linked with aspects of social functioning and cannabis use patterns. Using the undergraduate psychology participant pool in an internet-based protocol, I tested my primary aim using the Comprehensive Affect Testing System-Abbreviated (CATS-A). I evaluated secondary and tertiary aims using comparative analyses of CATS-A, self-report questionnaires, and baseline measures of social functioning. Facial ER, prosodic ER, and overall ER CATS-A scores were not significantly associated with cannabis use status. While this may indicate that there is not a relationship between intermittent cannabis use and ER, these findings could be due to the underpowered sample. There was a significant association between cross-modal ER scores and cannabis use status, a novel finding. This suggests that cannabis use may affect the interpretation of emotionally ambiguous social cues. There were significant associations between facial ER, overall ER, and prosody ER scores and fear of negative evaluation scores as a function of cannabis use status. This is in line with previous studies suggesting that cannabis may be used by those with social anxiety to reduce negative feelings in social situations. No other CATS-A scores were significantly associated with measures related to social functioning or use characteristics. These findings suggest that there may not be functional reprecussions secondary to cross-modal ER deficits, however further investigation is required in light of our limitations.

The effects of chronic cannabis use on cross-modal emotion recognition

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details