New research published in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology has found sex differences in the relationship between cannabis use and negative priming.
Negative priming refers to the cognitive process of suppressing one’s attention to distracting stimuli and instead focusing on relevant stimuli.
The study of 194 Australian women and 131 Australian men compared frequent cannabis users to occasional cannabis users, and found that frequent cannabis use was associated with reduced negative priming among women — but not among men.
PsyPost interviewed Lucy Albertella of the University of New South Wales about her study. Read her responses below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
I was interested in examining sex differences in frequent cannabis users as relatively few human studies have looked at this issue. The lack of interest surprised me as animal studies have suggested for some time that chronic cannabinoid exposure may affect males and females differently.
What should the average person take away from your study?
We found that females who used cannabis frequently showed significant deficits on a measure of attentional inhibition, negative priming, compared to male frequent users, and less frequent users. To the extent that the measure we used assessed attentional inhibition, this finding suggests that females who use cannabis frequently might have deficits in filtering out irrelevant information, which in turn could lead to distractibility.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
The main limitation of the paper was its cross-sectional design, which means that we cannot know from this study alone whether the deficits seen in female cannabis users were present before the onset of cannabis use or whether they are, for example, the result of frequent cannabis use.
Such questions are better addressed by studies that are longitudinal. That said, the current finding came from the baseline data of a longitudinal study. The longitudinal data are currently being analysed and hopefully will provide some answers to these questions.
The study, “Frequent cannabis use is associated with reduced negative priming among females“, was also co-authored by Mike E. Le Pelley and Jan Copeland.
