Distraction resulting from disease related words in alcohol-dependent inpatients: a controlled dichotic listening study.

To test whether alcoholics develop an information processing bias towards disease-related stimuli, 30 alcoholic inpatients and 30 controls were administered a dichotic listening task. Three different stimulus types were presented to the right (ignored) channel: neutral words, rare neutral words and alcohol-related words. The hypothesized information processing bias should cause patients to make disproportionally more shadowing errors in the third condition. An ANOVA revealed a significant condition effect (P < 0.001), a tendency towards a group effect (P = 0.09) and a significant interaction (P < 0.01) in the expected direction. There was a marked increase of errors in alcoholics when disease-related stimuli were presented compared to the neutral conditions and to the controls.