Street Drug Linked To Lasting Social Deficits

Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry;  Mental Health
Article Date: 28 Apr 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Methamphetamine abuse has been linked to deficits in social reasoning. This is the finding of a study published online today, 28th April 2009, in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Julie Henry from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Peter Rendell from Australian Catholic University tested 20 adults with a history of Methamphetamine (MA) abuse (four years use on average) on measures of social reasoning.

Peter Rendell said: "Previous research has found that that Methamphetamine may cause problems in social reasoning. As two of the most important aspects of social-thinking are recognising emotion on people's faces and understanding that others think about things differently to you - known as Theory of Mind - we wanted to see whether users of MA were impaired in these specific thought processes."

When compared with a group of people with no history of drug use, the group who had used MA showed significant deficits on both the facial emotion recognition task and a Theory of Mind task which involved naming the feelings expressed in photos of people's eyes.

"This tells us that MA use has psychological consequences, and, potentially, consequences for these individuals' social functioning. The size of these social reasoning deficits was comparable to the memory problems that have also been found in users of MA, consistent with other evidence showing that MA is a dangerous drug which can do lasting harm.

"However, we must also consider the possibility that these deficits could have been present before drug use and even a risk factor for drug use, in that people who struggle to make sense of other people might be more vulnerable to taking drugs in the first place."

Source
The British Psychological Society