A video has been produced and can be accessed via our secure project page.  Here’s how:

First visit: www.innovationwithsubstance.org.uk/user
Enter project name:  legalhighs
Enter password:  training

(all details are case sensitive)

Newsletter subscribers find out first about these materials, if you’re not already subscribed then click here to sign up.

It’s not the norm but to celebrate we’ll actually be giving away some presents – we’ll soon be launching a new drug training website offering free video content and online resources.  Newsletter subscribers will be the first to know – so sign up today.

Each month we publish news and updates, often with up to date information on topics of interest.

The June newsletter includes:

• Free Mephedrone briefings
• Free Parent/Carer Resource
• Drugs & The Brain Workshops

To view the June newsletter click here.

Not already subscribed to the newsletter?  Sign up here.

The story along with a video of the undercover investigation can be found here:

New China Drugs Get Round Mephedrone Ban

We will introduce a system of temporary bans on new ‘legal highs’ while health issues are considered by independent experts. We will not permanently ban a substance without receiving full advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Working in partnership with Stockton-on-Tees PCT, IWS will deliver training to over 150 front-line staff each year, the training will include the use of the AUDIT screening tool, and evidence-based brief advice.

A project website has been developed to promote the training locally:

www.etoh-training.org.uk

The service is open to anyone whether they live in Nottingham or not.  It aims to help parents and carers gain a better understanding of drugs and how they impact on young people.

The goal was to come up with a new way to share drugs information with parents & carers in a way that fits with hectic lifestyles – the ‘tips by email service’ and audio podcast do exactly that.

Matt Hayman, Innovation with Substance.

Once a week for six weeks subscribers receive bite-size chunks of info and top tips relevant to parents and carers.

Prefer to listen rather than read?  There’s also a podcast version of each email available for download.

Click for more information and the sign-up form.

Remember the service is for anyone (you don’t even need to be a parent or carer) so feel free to pass on the link: www.tinyurl.com/drugaware

In response to very positive feedback to our ‘Smarties activity’ places are now available for our one day ‘Drugs and the Brain’ workshop.

The course aims to answer theses questions and guide you through this fascinating topic that captivated people’s imagination during some recent Alcohol workshops we’ve been running in Hampshire.

The course is all about real world application to the work you do – whether it’s front-line delivery, service management or commissioning.

Full details can be found on our drug training page.

Recent drug training feedback:

“Excellent presentation style.  Very engaging & supportive.  Really pleased it wasn’t ’death by Powerpoint’.  Good venue.”

“Well done, brilliant ideas I can use and adapt to bring advice alive.”

“Best course I have been ever been on.  I will use it – thanks.”

All comments were written feedback following  ’Alcohol Train The Trainer’ workshops, May 2010 – copies available on request

In response to a large number of requests for information from individuals and agencies IWS have teamed up with Hampshire Drug and Alcohol Action Team to offer a series of free 2hr briefings in May and June for anyone working with young people in Hampshire, with limited spaces also available for anyone working in other parts of the country.

For more information and to book a place online please visit the event website.

Bold reading time 5 minutes

At a recent event I got into a discussion with a speaker about how taking drugs might impact on a person’s ability to recognise emotion in other people.

Well there is some evidence to support this.  The speaker was relativly new to the subject and asked if I would prepare a short paper outlining some of the studies that have looked at this.

Well I wrote the paper and thought it may be of interest to readers of the blog:

Substance misuse and recognition of emotion in others

The production and recognition of emotional facial expression (EFE) serves an important, controllable, communicatory function that is a key component of social cognition, interaction and behavioural learning (Blair, 2003; Coupland, Singh, Sustrik, Ting, & Blair, 2003; Ekman, 1997).  Research has identified six basic EFEs that can be recognised consistently across cultures: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise (Ekman, et al., 1987).

Several exceptions to theories suggesting that EFE recognition is universal to all have developed, these exceptions cross fields of study including substance misuse, psychiatry and neuropsychology.

Research has shown that impairments and attenuations in the ability of individuals to consistently recognise specific facial expressions have been linked to a wider range of behavioural, psychiatric and neurological disorders (Addington & Addington, 1998; Bozikas, Kosmidis, Anezoulaki, Giannakou, & Karavatos, 2004; Dujardin, et al., 2004; Sprengelmeyer, et al., 1997).  Furthermore, certain brain areas have been identified as important neurological substrates of individual emotions, in particular those of anger, disgust, and fear (Adolphs, 2002; Critchley, 2003; Critchley, et al., 2005).

Substance misuse has been shown to have multiple dynamic effects on recognition of emotion, research has found that chronic use of alcohol (Townshend & Duka, 2003) and opiates (Kornreich, et al., 2003) are implicated in impairments to the individual’s ability to recognise anger and disgust, whilst heavy use of psychostimulants relate to deficits in the recognition of fear (Hoshi, Bisla, & Curran, 2004; Kemmis, Hall, Kingston, & Morgan, 2007).

References

Addington, J., & Addington, D. (1998). Facial affect recognition and information processing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Schizophr Res, 32(3), 171-181.

Adolphs, R. (2002). Neural systems for recognizing emotion. Curr Opin Neurobiol, 12(2), 169-177.

Blair, R. J. (2003). Facial expressions, their communicatory functions and neuro-cognitive substrates. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 358(1431), 561-572.

Bozikas, V. P., Kosmidis, M. H., Anezoulaki, D., Giannakou, M., & Karavatos, A. (2004). Relationship of affect recognition with psychopathology and cognitive performance in schizophrenia. J Int Neuropsychol Soc, 10(4), 549-558.

Coupland, N. J., Singh, A. J., Sustrik, R. A., Ting, P., & Blair, R. (2003). Effects of diazepam on facial emotion recognition. J Psychiatry Neurosci, 28(6), 452-463.

Critchley, H. D. (2003). Emotion and its disorders. Br Med Bull, 65, 35-47.

Critchley, H. D., Rotshtein, P., Nagai, Y., O’Doherty, J., Mathias, C. J., & Dolan, R. J. (2005). Activity in the human brain predicting differential heart rate responses to emotional facial expressions. Neuroimage, 24(3), 751-762.

Dujardin, K., Blairy, S., Defebvre, L., Duhem, S., Noel, Y., Hess, U., et al. (2004). Deficits in decoding emotional facial expressions in Parkinson’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 42(2), 239-250.

Ekman, P. (1997). Should we call it expression or communication? Innovations Social Sci. Res. , 10, 333-344.

Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., O’Sullivan, M., Chan, A., Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, I., Heider, K., et al. (1987). Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. J Pers Soc Psychol, 53(4), 712-717.

Hoshi, R., Bisla, J., & Curran, H. V. (2004). The acute and sub-acute effects of ‘ecstasy’ (MDMA) on processing of facial expressions: preliminary findings. Drug Alcohol Depend, 76(3), 297-304.

Kemmis, L., Hall, J. K., Kingston, R., & Morgan, M. J. (2007). Impaired fear recognition in regular recreational cocaine users. Psychopharmacology (Berl), 194(2), 151-159.

Kornreich, C., Foisy, M. L., Philippot, P., Dan, B., Tecco, J., Noel, X., et al. (2003). Impaired emotional facial expression recognition in alcoholics, opiate dependence subjects, methadone maintained subjects and mixed alcohol-opiate antecedents subjects compared with normal controls. Psychiatry Res, 119(3), 251-260.

Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A. W., Pundt, I., Sprengelmeyer, A., Calder, A. J., Berrios, G., et al. (1997). Disgust implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Proc Biol Sci, 264(1389), 1767-1773.

Townshend, J. M., & Duka, T. (2003). Mixed emotions: alcoholics’ impairments in the recognition of specific emotional facial expressions. Neuropsychologia, 41(7), 773-782.

How people become addicted to drugs and why they may find it difficult to stop are issues explored by the EMCDDA in new material released ahead of International day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking (26 June).

The information package, dedicated to emerging research in neurobiology, examines the social, ethical and policy implications of scientific developments in this field.

To access the material visit the EMCDDA