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Impaired perception of emotion in others has been described and confirmed in addictions with substances, but no such data exists regarding addictions without substances. As it has been hypothesized that toxic effect of substances on the brain was responsible for the impairments described, studying addictions without substances could be of interest to confirm this hypothesis. Twenty-two male pathological gamblers were compared to 22 male healthy controls matched for age and education level on non-verbal emotion perception tasks including faces, voices, and musical excerpts. Depression and anxiety levels were controlled for. Pathological gamblers significantly underestimated the intensity of peacefulness in music, and overall they were less accurate when reading emotion in voices and faces. They also overestimated emotional intensity in neutral voices and faces. Although anxiety levels did account for accuracy problems when detecting fear in voices and for overestimating emotions in neutral faces, anxiety levels did not explain the range of deficits observed. This is the first study showing non-verbal perception deficits in a purely behavioural addiction. These findings show that deficits in decoding non-verbal signals are associated with addictive behaviours per se, and are not due solely to toxic effects of substances on the brain., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Previous research has shown that deficits in the domain of emotions strongly characterize alcoholism. Patients diagnosed with alcoholism show impairments in emotional mimic recognition, as well as in the domain of emotional prosody. These data suggest that male alcoholics might suffer from a generalized emotional impairment associated with dysfunctions in empathy. Taken altogether, those deficits might influence alcoholics' relational domain and their performance in complex communicative situations such as ironic interactions. The present study investigates the ability of chronic male alcoholics to recognize the emotional component of ironic contexts and its relation to the comprehension of ironic meaning as a function of their empathic abilities., Methods: Forty-four male subjects participated in a story comprehension task. They were asked to read stories with either an ironic or a nonironic ending. Participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire about communicative intentions and the emotional states of the stories' characters. Moreover, the correct comprehension of the ironic meaning was assessed through a self-reported questionnaire and related to the empathy quotient (EQ) which was measured in a preexperimental phase., Results: Alcoholic subjects showed a lower EQ in comparison to healthy subjects and recognized significant fewer ironic endings. Social skills results were particularly impaired. The correlation between EQ and ironic endings recognition was significant. Moreover, alcoholics showed a tendency to attribute positive emotions to both ironic and nonironic contexts, showing an opposite pattern in comparison with control subjects who tended to associate negative emotions to ironic contexts., Conclusions: The present study indicates that emotional recognition deficits that have been previously observed in chronic alcoholics extend to complex interactive contexts. This deficit is associated with a more general impairment of empathy, especially in its social skill component. Clinical implications of the present results are discussed., (Copyright © 2012 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.)

It has been repeatedly shown that alcohol dependence is associated with emotional impairments, particularly for emotional facial expression decoding. Nevertheless, most earlier studies focused on basic emotions and did not explore more subtle affective states. In order to obtain a more accurate evaluation, and in view of earlier results showing impaired performance for this task among high-risk children of alcohol-dependent participants, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test was used here to explore emotional recognition in alcohol dependence. We showed that the deficit described earlier for basic negative emotions is (1) generalizable to complex and positive emotions; and (2) specific for emotional features. This strengthens the proposition of a general face recognition impairment in alcohol dependence., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Emotional impairments constitute a crucial and widely described dimension of alcoholism, but several affective abilities are still to be thoroughly explored among alcohol-dependent patients. This is particularly true for empathy, which constitutes an essential emotional competence for interpersonal relations and has been shown to be highly impaired in various psychiatric states. The present study aimed at exploring empathic abilities in alcoholism, and notably the hypothesis of a differential deficit between emotional and cognitive empathy., Methods: Empathy abilities were evaluated among 30 recently detoxified inpatients diagnosed with alcohol dependence and 30 paired healthy controls, using highly validated questionnaires (Interpersonal Reactivity Index [J Pers Soc Psychol44:113] and Empathy Quotient [J Autism Dev Disord34:163]). Correlational analyses were performed to evaluate the links between empathy scores and psychopathological measures (i.e., depression, anxiety, interpersonal problems, and alexithymia)., Results: When psychiatric comorbities are controlled for, alcoholism is not associated with a general empathy deficit, but rather with a dissociated pattern combining impaired emotional empathy and preserved cognitive one. Moreover, this emotional empathy deficit is not associated with depression or anxiety scores, but is negatively correlated with alexithymia and the severity of interpersonal problems., Conclusions: At the theoretical level, this first observation of a specific deficit for emotional empathy in alcoholism, combined with the exact inverse pattern observed in other psychiatric populations, leads to a double-dissociation, which supports the notion that emotional and cognitive empathy are 2 distinct abilities. At the clinical level, this deficit calls for considering emotional empathy rehabilitation as a crucial concern in psychotherapy., (2011 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.)

Objective: Studies exploring neurophysiological correlates of main psychiatric disorders have commonly used event-related potentials (ERP) during a visual or an auditory oddball task. The main results concern modulations of the P3b amplitude and/or latency. The present study aims to increase the clinical sensitivity of these P3b modulations by using a more ecological oddball design, using synchronized pairs of audio-visual emotional stimuli., Method: Two groups of healthy participants, one composed of controls and the other of students displaying anxious and depressive tendencies completed visual, auditory and audio-visual (cross-modal) oddball tasks, in which they had to detect deviant happy and sad stimuli among neutral ones as quickly as possible. Behavioral performance and P3b ERP data were analyzed., Results: Subjects displaying anxious and depressive tendencies exhibited lower P3b amplitude than the controls, but only in the cross-modal oddball task., Conclusions: Although the two groups of subjects differed in their levels of co-morbid anxiety and depression, unimodal visual and auditory oddball tasks did not allow us to detect this difference by P3b amplitude modulations, but the cross-modal task did., Significance: These results suggest that a cross-modal oddball design should be used in future studies to increase the sensitivity of the P300 amplitude differences between healthy participants and those with clinical symptoms., (Copyright © 2010 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The present study aims to explore whether an impairment in emotional facial expressions (EFE) decoding is specific to alcoholism compared with opiate dependence. An EFE decoding test consisting of 16 photographs of EFE portraying happiness, anger, sadness and disgust was administered to five different groups of 30 subjects each: recently detoxified alcoholics (RA); opiate addicts under methadone maintenance treatment (OM); detoxified opiate addicts (OA); detoxified subjects with both alcohol and opiate dependence antecedents (DAO); and normal controls (NC). Repeated measures analysis of variance using a multivariate approach was conducted on EFE decoding accuracy scores with group as the between-subjects factor. Accuracy scores were significantly lower in RA and DAO than in OM and OA, which had significantly lower scores than NC. Low accuracy scores in RA and DAO confirm previous results indicating that alcoholism is associated with impaired EFE recognition. Results in OM and OA indicate that opiate dependence is also associated with an impaired EFE decoding but less than in alcoholism. Alcohol and opiate chronic consumption could both exercise a deleterious effect on EFE-decoding brain function, alcohol having the most severe impact. Alternatively, EFE-decoding problems could be present before the development of alcohol and opiate dependence, with an additional effect of chronic alcohol consumption on EFE decoding. In this context, EFE-decoding impairment could reflect a more general emotional intelligence deficit in addicted populations.

Aim To test the generalized emotional decoding impairment hypothesis in alcoholism. Design Cross-sectional behavioural study comparing emotion recognition conveyed by faces, voices and musical excerpts. Setting Alcohol detoxification unit of Brugmann University Hospital. Participants Twenty-five recently detoxified alcohol-dependent patients were compared to 25 normal controls matched for sex, age and educational level. Measurements From faces, voices and musical excerpts, participants were instructed to rate the intensity of several emotions on a scale from 0 for 'absent' to 9 for 'highly present'. Depression, anxiety and sustained/selective attention capacities were controlled for. Findings Alcohol-dependent patients were less accurate than controls in identifying the target emotion in faces ( P < 0.001), voices ( P < 0.001) and musical excerpts ( P < 0.001). Conclusions Alcohol-dependent patients who are completing detoxification are impaired in recognizing emotions conveyed by faces, voices and music; these results suggest a generalized emotional decoding impairment. Hypothetically, deficits in the fronto-parietal mirror neurone system could link all these disturbances together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]