Social decision-making in chronic ecstasy users

ALEJANDRO RAMOS USAJ; LUCAS SEDEÑO; PAUTASSI R.M.; GARCIA A; AGUSTÍN IBÁÑEZ

Carlos Paz

Congreso; XXXIV Annual Meeting of the Argentine Society for Neuroscience; 2019

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Previous works have shown that acute 3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) administration and chronic consumption of ecstasy (i.e. MDMA street name) alters social cognition on a variety of domains, including social decision-making. However, this research has suffered from several methodological limitations (mainly, extensive polysubstance use among ecstasy users). Furthermore, there is no evidence to date relating chronic ecstasy use and complex social decision-making processes such as bargaining. In this study, we intended to address this gap in addition to overcoming limitations of previous works. We compared 22 ecstasy users (EXT) with exceptionally low polysubstance (defined as less than 10 occasions of use of other substances) use with 11 cannabis-only users (CAN) and 12 alcohol-only users (ALC) on an iterative version of the Ultimatum Game (UG) in which subjects played as the proposers against simulated respondents. All groups showed preserved basic bargaining indexes. Nevertheless, there was a marginally significant difference (p = .059) between groups in the mean value of hyper-fair offers (>50% of the money offered to the other player). The EXT group offered significantly more than the ALC group but not than the CAN group. There were no differences between the ALC and the CAN group in this measure. Our results suggest that ecstasy users do not display decision-making deficits and under certain circumstances, they behave more altruistically.