It happens unconsciously without our say so! Automatic, habitual, it happens to us rather than us wanting or willing it to happen. For chronic alcoholics there is an automatic physiological response when we see cues such as other people drinking. So if there are people out there relatively new to recovery, listen up. What I have discovered is that I have an “alcoholic brain” and not a “alcoholic mind” and there is a huge difference. It used to churn me up, these so-called alcoholics who had no a physiological response to alcohol-related “cues”. Is this a “craving” for alcohol, do I still want to drink? Do I still have an “alcoholic mind?“. I used to feel ashamed as I did have an instantaneous “wet tongue” and still do years later when I see people drinking alcohol. We discuss the differential stress effects on behavioral hedonic capacity found as a function of worry, the role of past depression as a moderator of stress effects among worriers, and the need for future work to further explicate the mechanisms that may modulate reward response under stress.When I first came into recovery I used to get frightened by other abstinent alcoholics proclaim that they were so glad they did not get the “wet tongue” when they saw alcohol or people drinking alcohol. Blunted baseline response bias predicted higher future depression in both groups. The stress effect in worriers was modulated by past depression diagnostic status whereas worriers with no past depression demonstrated blunted baseline hedonic capacity and heightened hedonic capacity under stress, worriers with past depression demonstrated the normative response pattern. Contrary to predictions, worriers demonstrated intact hedonic capacity under stress. Controls exhibited the expected reward learning pattern in the baseline condition, demonstrating intact hedonic responding, as well as the expected pattern of behavioral anhedonia under stress. Further, this study assessed whether stress-induced hedonic deficits predicted future depression. Specifically, we utilized an experimental manipulation of stress and a behavioral index of anhedonia to test the hypothesis that individuals with GAD, who are at higher risk for developing depression symptoms, exhibit greater stress-related deficits in hedonic capacity than do nonanxious controls. This was the first experimental study of the effects of stress on hedonic capacity in an analog generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) sample (a high worry group). A growing body of work links psychopathology to changes in hedonic capacity following stressors.

Stress induced hedonic dysfunction