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Who Is There? Alcoholics Are Missing Face Values

Getting along with other people is a critical ingredient for a full and happy life. Yet building and maintaining healthy relationships requires the ability to correctly read and express emotional facial expressions (EFE), an ability that alcohol-dependent individuals tend to lack. It has been observed that alcoholic subjects overestimate the intensity of EFE, misinterpret EFE, and are unaware of this impairment. This study explored why people with alcohol dependence (AD) have deficits in emotional facial expression (EFE): Is it because of fundamental emotional problems, or because of a more general impairment in visual and/or facial processing?

Researchers asked 18 AD patients (9 women, 9 men), during their third week at a detoxification treatment center, and 18 age/gender/education-matched healthy “control” volunteers, to perform several tasks. These tasks evaluated: one, basic ability to process visual-spatial and facial-identity information; two, simple reaction times; and three, complex facial-features identification (specifically, age, emotion, gender, and race). All of the participants’ accuracy and reaction times were recorded and compared.

The AD patients did not appear to have deficits in basic visual-spatial and facial-identity processing, although their reaction times were slower in comparison to the controls. However, when the age, gender and race aspects of the third task were controlled for, the AD patients continued to show deficits when identifying emotions. This means that EFE-processing deficits that are often witnessed among persons with chronic alcoholism are specifically due to an impaired ability to decode emotions. These findings may have implications for future efforts that address helping AD individuals build healthy relationships with family, friends and work colleagues.

(Maurage, P, Campanella, S, Philippot, P, Martin, S, de Timary, P: Face processing in chronic alcoholism: A specific deficit for emotional features. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 32:600-606, 2008.)

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