Perceived friendship and binge drinking in young adults: A study of the Human Connectome Project data

Abstract

Background: Peer influences figure prominently in young adult binge drinking. Women have trended to show a level of alcohol use on par with men during the last decades. It would be of interest to investigate the neural processes of social cognition that may underlie binge drinking and the potential sex differences.

Methods: Here, we examined the data of the Human Connectome Project where we identified a total of 175 binge drinkers (125 men) and 285 non-binge drinkers (97 men) performing a social cognition task during brain imaging. We analyzed the imaging data with published routines and evaluated the results at a corrected threshold.

Results: Both male and female binge relative to non-binge drinkers showed higher perceived friendship. Binge relative to non-binge drinkers demonstrated diminished activations in the anterior medial orbitofrontal cortex (amOFC) during perception of social vs. random interaction, with a more prominent effect size in women. Further, whole-brain regression identified activity of the right posterior insula (rPI) in negative correlation with perceived friendship score in non-binge drinking women. Post-hoc analyses showed significant correlation of rPI activity with perceived friendship, amOFC activity, and a summary measure of alcohol use severity identified by principal component analysis, across all subjects. Mediation and path analysis demonstrated a significant model: amOFC activity → rPI activity → perceived friendship → severity of alcohol use.

Conclusions: These findings support peer influences on binge drinking and suggest neural correlates that may relate altered social cognitive processing to alcohol misuse in young adults.

Keywords: Alcohol addiction; Alcohol use disorder; Peer pressure; Positive alcohol effect; fMRI.

Figure 1.

Clinical and behavioral measures of men binger (MB), men non-binger (MnB), women binger (WB), and women non-binger (WnB): (A) Friendship score; (B) Difference in accuracy rate between social and random blocks or AR_SOC-AR_RAN; (C) Difference in reaction time between social and random blocks or RT_SOC-RT_RAN; and (D) Severity of alcohol use as quantified by the weight of the first principal component (PC1) of PCA of all 13 drinking measures. Correlation of drinking PC1 with perceived friendship scores (E) across all subjects and (F) for men and women separately. Note that residuals are plotted here with age accounted for in the regressions. Histograms show mean ± SE. **p ≤ 0.001.

Figure 2.

Regional brain activations to the contrast “social – random” in the social perception task. (A) binger vs. non-binger; (B) women binger vs. non-binger. Voxel p < 0.001 in combination with a cluster p < 0.05 FWE corrected. Color bars show voxel t values; cool: non-binger > binger. Clusters are overlaid on a T1 structural image in neurological orientation: right = right. The inset shows a mid-sagittal section to highlight the clusters. (C) The β contrast of “social – random” (mean ± SE) of the amOFC and vPCu cluster identified in women shown separately for the four groups. ** p < 0.001.

Figure 3.

(A) Linear regression of the contrast “social – random” against perceived friendship score identified a cluster in the right posterior insula (rPI) in negative correlation for women non-binger (WnB). Voxel p < 0.001, uncorrected in combination with a cluster p < 0.05 FWE corrected. Color bars show voxel t values; cool: negative correlation. Clusters are overlaid on a T1 structural image in neurological orientation: right=right. We performed slope tests to examine the difference in the regression between (B) women binger (WB, dark green) and WnB (light green) and between (C) WnB and men non-binger (MnB, light blue). Both showed a significant difference in slope. Note that residuals are plotted here with age accounted for in the regressions.

Figure 4.

Path model to show the inter-relationship of amOFC and rPI activity, perceived friendship and severity of drinking. The other models and fit statistics are shown in Supplementary Figure S1 and Supplementary Table S6.