Alcohol and Alcoholism Advance Access published online on June 17, 2009
Alcohol and Alcoholism, doi:10.1093/alcalc/agp037
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Impaired Emotional Facial Expression Decoding in Alcoholism is Also Present for Emotional Prosody and Body Postures
1 Cognitive Neurosciences and Clinical Psychology Research units, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
2 Department of Psychiatry, Brugmann Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
3 Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
4 Department of Psychiatry, St Luc Hospital, Catholic University of Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
* Corresponding author: Université Catholique de Louvain, Faculté de Psychologie, Unité NESC, Place du Cardinal Mercier, 10, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Tel: +32-10-479245; Fax: +32-10-473774; E-mail: pierre.maurage{at}uclouvain.be
Received 2 February 2009; first review notified 2 March 2009; in revised form 6 May 2009; accepted 19 May 2009
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Abstract |
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Aims: Emotional facial expression (EFE) decoding impairment has been repeatedly reported in alcoholism (e.g. Philippot et al., 1999). Nevertheless, several questions are still under debate concerning this alteration, notably its generalization to other emotional stimuli and its variation according to the emotional valence of stimuli. Methods: Eighteen recently detoxified alcoholic subjects and 18 matched controls performed a decoding test consisting in emotional intensity ratings on various stimuli (faces, voices, body postures and written scenarios) depicting different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness). Perceived threat and difficulty were also assessed for each stimulus. Results: Alcoholic individuals had a preserved decoding performance for happiness stimuli, but alcoholism was associated with an underestimation of sadness and fear, and with a general overestimation of anger. More importantly, these decoding impairments were observed for faces, voices and postures but not for written scenarios. Conclusions: We observed for the first time a generalized emotional decoding impairment in alcoholism, as this impairment is present not only for faces but also for other visual (i.e. body postures) and auditory stimuli. Moreover, we report that this alteration (1) is mainly indexed by an overestimation of anger and (2) cannot be explained by an ‘affect labelling’ impairment, as the semantic comprehension of written emotional scenarios is preserved. Fundamental and clinical implications are discussed.