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ALCOHOL EXACERBATES
ANGER EXPRESSION, AGGRESSION

By Sherry Wasilow
Special to the Health Behavior News Service

Alcohol may put drinkers who tend to be angry at greater risk of becoming aggressive, according to a study of drinkers’ facial expressions, published in the June issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. 

Intoxicated individuals displayed more facial expressions of anger than sober people. Intoxicated participants also demonstrated a link between facial expressions of anger and the tendency to express anger outwardly after high levels of provocation, Amos Zeichner, Ph.D., of the University of Georgia and colleagues report.

“If individuals tend to express their anger outwardly, alcohol will ‘turn up the volume,’ so that such a person will express anger more frequently and more intensely,” says Zeichner.

“Alcohol intoxication brings out people’s natural tendencies in the expression of anger. Our findings strengthen the notion that alcohol increases the likelihood that certain drinkers, particularly those with the tendency to be angry and to express their anger outwardly, become aggressive when provoked,” adds study co-author and graduate student Dominic Parrott.

The association between alcohol and aggression is huge, according to Robert O. Pihl, Ph.D., of McGill University.

“Alcohol is involved in half of all murders, rapes and assaults. But the dynamics of this association are complicated, which is why any research that focuses on elucidating this relationship is important for society in general,” he says.

The researchers studied 136 male social drinkers ages 18 to 30, recruited from undergraduate psychology courses and via local media advertisements. During a 20-minute session, 63 participants consumed two alcoholic beverages, bringing them to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent. The rest drank an equivalent amount of orange juice.

Participants were told they were then going to compete against another individual on a “reaction time” task, during which they might receive electric shocks from their opponent. While engaged in this fictitious task, which included both high and low shock levels or “provocation,” the participants’ experience of anger was unobtrusively assessed using a facial coding system, which classifies all observable facial activity into 44 unique “action units.”

Pihl says that facial expression and the facial coding system are good ways to assess anger.

“We need to understand that emotions and their regulation play an important role in the relationship between drinking and behaving aggressively. If this role is proven true, then it would be helpful to teach certain drinkers to moderate their use of alcohol, help them to effectively cope with their anger and, finally, learn how to respond to provocation in a de-escalating manner,” Zeichner and Parrott conclude.

The study was supported by the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia.

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