Alcohol increases feelings of aggression while cannabis reduces it, says a new study

A new research published in psychopharmacology found alcohol intoxication enhances feelings of aggression while cannabis intoxication diminishes such feelings.

The study involves 61 participants whose responses were measured with a computer-based experiment designed for the purpose. The findings suggest that alcohol consumption increases aggressive responses while cannabis consumption reduced aggressive responses.

Talking to PsyPost the study’s corresponding author Elizabeth de Sousa Fernandes Perna of Maastricht University, described the purpose of this study, “We were primarily interested to see how alcohol and cannabis would acutely affect subjective feelings of aggression next to physical acts of aggression when exposed to aggression stimuli”.

Distinguishing feelings of aggression from acts of aggression, Elizabeth concludes, “Alcohol intoxication can increase feelings of aggression in regular alcohol users, it does not automatically mean that it will lead to behavioral acts of aggression in a real-life setting. The same is true for cannabis, but vice versa, cannabis intoxication does not automatically lead to a reduction of aggressive behavior in regular cannabis users”.

Comparing alcohol intoxication with cannabis, Elizabeth says, “Intoxication with alcohol is more likely to lead to aggression compared to cannabis intoxication”.

Talking about the major caveats of the study, the corresponding author says, “We have shown that aggressive feelings were enhanced following an alcohol dose of 0.8 g/kg and we have also observed that aggressive responses increased with heightened feelings of aggression. However we cannot conclude that a higher alcohol dose is more likely to cause physical aggression as we did not investigate the effect of varying alcohol (or cannabis) doses on aggression. It is also interesting to see if the interaction between alcohol or cannabis intoxication and aggression exposure would be different when looking at males and females separately. Previous studies indicate that men are more likely to become aggressive when drunk, but is this also the case when both genders are exposed to aggression stimuli”?

Realizing the need for future studies to investigate drug-aggression relationship, she stresses, “Future studies investigating the drug-aggression relation should investigate the interaction between different risk factors that are associated with aggression, such as consumption patterns of alcohol and drug use, combined with neuroendocrine measures, such as testosterone and cortisol ratios, and genetic markers. Other factors that also play an important role are personality traits and personal expectations about the effects of alcohol”l.

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