Decoding of emotional components in complex communicative situations (irony) and its relation to empathic abilities in male chronic alcoholics: an issue for treatment

Cross-Linguistic Recognition of Irony Through Visual and Acoustic Cues

To avoid misunderstandings, ironic speakers may accompany their ironic remarks with a particular intonation and specific facial expressions that signal that the message should not be taken at face value. The acoustic realization of the ironic tone of voice differs from language to language, whereas the ironic face manifests the speaker's negative stance and might thus have a universal basis. We conducted a study on 574 participants speaking 6 different languages (French, German, Dutch, English, Mandarin, and Italian-the control group) to verify whether they could recognize ironic remarks uttered in Italian in three different modalities: watching muted videos, listening to audio tracks, and when both cues were present. We found that speakers of other languages could overall recognize irony uttered in Italian when all the markers were present, and they relied mostly on visual cues: In all these language groups, accuracy in the audio-only modality was always lower than accuracy in the video-only modality, although this trend was significant only for Chinese and Dutch participants. Moreover, the rate of recognition in the audio-visual modality was always significantly higher compared to the audio-only, while the difference between the audio-visual and the video-only modality was significant only for the English group. Overall, these results speak in favor of the hypothesis of a common basis for the visual expression of irony, whereas the acoustic markers alone do not constitute a reliable cue for the cross-linguistic recognition of irony.

Meta-analysis of associations between empathy and alcohol use and problems in clinical and non-clinical samples

AIMS

To (1) measure the aggregated effect size of empathy deficits in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD) compared with healthy controls, (2) measure the aggregated effect sizes for associations between lower empathy and heavier alcohol consumption and more alcohol problems in non-clinical samples and (3) identify potential moderators on the variability of effect sizes across studies in these meta-analyses.

METHOD

PsycINFO, PubMed and Google Scholar were searched following a pre-registered International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) protocol (CRD42021225392) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology. We meta-analyzed (using random-effects models) mean differences in empathy between individuals with AUD compared with healthy controls and associations between empathy and alcohol consumption and alcohol problems in non-clinical samples. A total of 714 participants were included in the meta-analysis on clinical samples; 3955 were included in the meta-analyses on non-clinical samples.

RESULTS

Individuals with AUD reported significantly lower empathy than healthy controls [Hedges' g = -0.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) = -0.91, -0.16, k = 9, P < 0.01, Q = 40.09, I2  = 80.04]. Study quality [Q = 1.88, degrees of freedom (d.f.) = 1, P = 0.17] and gender (β = -0.006, Z = -0.60, P = 0.55) were not moderators. Increases in age corresponded to an increase in effect size (β = 0.095, Z = 3.34, P < 0.001). Individuals with AUD (versus healthy controls) had significantly lower cognitive (Hedges' g = -0.44, CI = -0.79, -0.10, P < 0.05), but not affective empathy (Hedges' g = -0.19, CI = -0.51, 0.14, P = 0.27), and the difference between these was significant (Z = 2.34, k = 6, P < 0.01). In non-clinical samples, individuals with lower (versus higher) empathy reported heavier alcohol consumption (r = -0.12, CI = -0.15, -0.09, k = 11, P < 0.001, Q = 9.68, I2  = 0.00) and more alcohol problems (r = -0.08, CI = -0.14, -0.01, k = 7, P = 0.021, Q = 6.55, I2  = 8.34). There was no significant heterogeneity across studies.

CONCLUSION

Individuals with alcohol use disorder appear to show deficits in empathy compared with healthy controls. Deficits are particularly pronounced for older individuals and for cognitive (versus affective) empathy. In non-clinical samples, lower empathy appears to be associated with heavier alcohol consumption and more alcohol problems.

Neural mechanisms underlying empathy during alcohol abstinence: evidence from connectome-based predictive modeling

Empathy impairments have been linked to alcohol dependence even during abstinent periods. Nonetheless, the neural underpinnings of abstinence-induced empathy deficits remain unclear. In this study, we employed connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) by using whole brain resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) to predict empathy capability of abstinent alcoholics (n = 47) versus healthy controls (n = 59). In addition, the generalizability of the predictive model (i.e., one group treated as a training dataset and another one treated as a test dataset) was performed to determine whether healthy controls and abstinent alcoholics share common neural fingerprints of empathy. Our results showed that abstinent alcoholics relative to healthy controls had decreased empathy capacity. Although no predictive models were observed in the abstinence group, we found that individual empathy scores in the healthy group can be reliably predicted by functional connectivity from the default mode network (DMN) to the sensorimotor network (SMN), occipital network, and cingulo-opercular network (CON). Moreover, the identified connectivity fingerprints of healthy controls could be generalized to predict empathy in the abstinence group. These findings indicate that neural circuits accounting for empathy may be disrupted by alcohol use and the impaired degree varies greatly among abstinent individuals. The large inter-individual variation may impede identification of the predictive model of empathy in alcohol abstainers.

Dark Side or Bright Side: The Impact of Alcohol Drinking on the Trust of Chinese Rural Residents

Existing studies have explored the causal effect of social capital on harmful drinking, while the effect of drinking habits on trust is scant. In China, drinking rituals and drinking culture are considered important ways of promoting social interaction and trust, especially in rural areas where traditional culture is stronger. Based on a field survey in rural China in 2019, this paper explores the relationship between drinking habits and trust. First, we found a negative relationship between drinking habits and trust, indicating that those people who drink alcohol are more likely to have a lower trust. Second, we found significant heterogeneity in the effect of alcohol consumption on social trust across various groups. Specifically, the negative effects of alcohol consumption on trust were stronger for the females than for males; drinking alcohol did not reduce the level of trust among the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in rural China; compared with the Han nationality, we found that the effect of drinking on trust was not significant for the ethnic minority. Third, we observed that the negative effects of alcohol consumption on trust had thresholds across age and income. Among people under 51, the risk of trust from drinking was greater than for those over 51; the negative effect of drinking on residents’ trust was more obvious in low-income families, but not significant in the group with an annual household income of more than CNY 40,000. Our empirical study provides a deeper understanding of drinking culture in rural China from a dialectical perspective.

The Role of the Posterior Cerebellum in Dysfunctional Social Sequencing

Recent advances in social neuroscience have highlighted the critical role of the cerebellum in social cognition, and especially the posterior cerebellum. Studies have supported the view that the posterior cerebellum builds internal action models of our social interactions to predict how other people's actions will be executed and what our most likely responses are to these actions. This mechanism allows to better anticipate action sequences during social interactions in an automatic and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand other's social behaviors and mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions, traits). In this paper, we argue that the central role of the posterior cerebellum in identifying and automatizing social action sequencing provides a fruitful starting point for investigating social dysfunctions in a variety of clinical pathologies, such as autism, obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorder, depression, and addiction. Our key hypothesis is that dysfunctions of the posterior cerebellum lead to under- or overuse of inflexible social routines and lack of plasticity for learning new, more adaptive, social automatisms. We briefly review past research supporting this view and propose a program of research to test our hypothesis. This approach might alleviate a variety of mental problems of individuals who suffer from inflexible automatizations that stand in the way of adjustable and intuitive social behavior, by increasing posterior cerebellar plasticity using noninvasive neurostimulation or neuro-guided training programs.

Social perception and knowledge impairments in severe alcohol use disorder: Group and individual-level findings

BACKGROUND

Consistent data highlight the presence and clinical significance of social cognition impairments in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD). However, social perception and knowledge (i.e., the ability to interpret social situations and to identify latent social rules), an important social cognition component, has not yet been explored in this disorder.

METHOD

35 patients with SAUD and 35 healthy controls (HC) completed the Social Perception and Knowledge test (PerSo), an experimental task requiring participants to comprehensively describe social situations and to identify the social rules illustrated in 8 pictures. We performed group and single-case analyses.

RESULTS

Patients with SAUD, as a group, spontaneously identified less relevant "where"/"who"/"what" aspects of the social situations (social perception) than HC. They were however able to provide these elements when explicitly asked to. They were also less able to identify the social rules that subtended the situations (social knowledge). Single-case analyses revealed that 23 % of patients were significantly impaired for social perception, and 34 % for social knowledge.

DISCUSSION

We provide novel evidence that SAUD is associated with social perception and knowledge impairments at the group level, and that these impairments strongly vary across patients. Such results should lead to the integration of social perception and knowledge impairments in the conceptualization and treatment of socio-affective difficulties in SAUD.

Higher-Order Language Dysfunctions in Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorder

Patients with alcohol use disorders (AUD) have difficulties with certain aspects of higher-order language functions (HOLF) but there is no data on a wide range of these functions in this group. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare different aspects of HOLF in patients with AUD and healthy controls (HC). A total of 31 patients with AUD and 44 HC took part in the study. We assessed HOLF with the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) and measured control variables: depression using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) as well as the speed of processing and executive functions with the Color Trails Test (CTT). Patients with AUD had lower results on nine RHLB tests. Moreover, AUD patients had higher scores on PHQ and longer reaction times on CTT. The differences in most RHLB results remained significant after co-varying the control variables. Patients with AUD have difficulties with making inferences from the text, understanding the meaning of individual words, metaphorical content, and prosody, which may impede the comprehension and production of discourse in which linguistic elements must be integrated with non-verbal cues and contextual information. These disturbances may impact various spheres of everyday life and negatively influence social, private, and professional functioning.

Tackling heterogeneity: Individual variability of emotion decoding deficits in severe alcohol use disorder

BACKGROUND

Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is associated with social cognition deficits. Patients with SAUD are impaired for the recognition of emotional facial expressions, particularly at early stages of abstinence. These deficits damage interpersonal relations and increase relapse risk. However, uncertainties still abound on their variation across emotions and on the heterogeneity of emotional impairments across patients. We addressed these questions by exploring how the deficit varies according to emotions' type/intensity and patients' heterogeneity.

METHODS

Sixty-five recently detoxified patients with SAUD and 65 matched healthy controls performed the Facial Emotion Recognition Test, assessing the ability to identify six emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) displayed by morphed faces with various intensities. Accuracy scores and detection thresholds were collected for each emotion. Beyond group comparisons, multiple single-case analyses determined the percentage of patients presenting decoding deficits for each emotion.

RESULTS

When current depression and anxiety symptoms were controlled for, patients did not present a general emotion decoding deficit, but were rather characterized by specific deficits for disgust/contempt in accuracy, and for disgust in detection threshold scores. Single-case analyses showed that only a third of patients presented a clinically significant emotional deficit.

CONCLUSIONS

Patients with SAUD only present emotional decoding deficits for specific interpersonal emotions (disgust/contempt) when subclinical psychopathological states are controlled for, and show no general emotional impairment. This goes against the proposal of a generalized social cognition deficit in this population. This group effect moreover masks a massive heterogeneity across patients, which has implications at experimental and clinical levels.

Hostile attributional bias in severe alcohol use disorder

Impairments in social cognition have been documented in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) over the past two decades. They have been linked with lower social functioning and poor treatment outcomes, illustrating their key role in the disorder. However, studies investigating social cognition in SAUD have largely focused on emotional decoding and theory of mind abilities, neglecting other important processes. We expand this line of research by exploring the association between SAUD and hostile attributional biases (i.e., the tendency to attribute hostile intentions to others), another clinically relevant subcomponent of social cognition. Thirty-five patients with SAUD and thirty-five matched healthy controls completed the short version of the Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire, a validated measure assessing participants' perceived hostility, blame attribution and aggression in relation to vignettes depicting social situations with negative outcomes and ambiguous intent. Patients with SAUD attributed more hostile intentions to others than did healthy controls. Moreover, this hostile attributional bias was associated with increased interpersonal problems in SAUD, as measured through the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems. We thus evidence hostile attributional bias in SAUD and extend the growing literature on social cognition impairments in this population. Furthermore, these findings corroborate the recent proposal that patients with SAUD exhibit biases toward socially threatening information. The association between hostile attributional bias and interpersonal problems suggests that targeting this bias in treatment may reduce the relapse risk resulting from interpersonal deficits. Recommendations are made to further explore the clinical relevance of hostile attributional bias in SAUD.

Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning

BACKGROUND

Individuals in treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) display deficits across a broad range of cognitive processes. Disruptions in affective processing are understudied, but may be particularly important for interpersonal functioning and post-treatment adaptation. In particular, the role of sex in AUD-associated emotion processing deficits remains largely unaddressed and was a focus of the current investigation.

METHODS

Fifty-six treatment seekers with AUD and 54 healthy community controls (N = 110) were administered an emotional face discrimination task. Non-affective tasks included a sex-discrimination task and two brief measures of executive functioning. Two measures of interpersonal function were included.

RESULTS

Emotion processing deficits were evident among women with AUD relative to other groups. This sex-contingent relationship was not observed in measures of executive function, sex-discrimination or interpersonal problems, although individuals with AUD performed more poorly on these measures.

CONCLUSIONS

Results were consistent with extant literatures examining cognitive, affective and interpersonal functioning among individuals with AUD, and provided novel evidence of vulnerability to alcohol-associated deficits in emotion processing among women. While similar sex-contingent effects were not apparent among other measures, results support modest interrelationships, specifically including the import of emotion processing to interpersonal functioning in AUD. These data offer guidance for further systematic investigation and highlight important considerations for future relapse-prevention and recovery-facilitation efforts.

Emotional processing and social cognition in alcohol use disorder

OBJECTIVE

To review deficits in emotional processing and social cognition potentially contributing to the dysfunctional emotion regulation and difficulties with interpersonal relationships observed in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and to provide directions for future research.

METHOD

First is presented a review of emotional and social-cognitive impairments in recently detoxified AUD individuals that include alexithymia, difficulties in decoding others' emotions, and reduced theory of mind and empathy skills. Social cognition disorders in AUD pose different issues discussed, such as whether (1) these deficits are consequences of excessive alcohol consumption or premorbid risk factors for addiction, (2) emotional and social impairments impede positive treatment outcome, (3) recovery of social abilities is possible with sustained abstinence, and (4) AUD patients are unaware of their emotional and social dysfunctions. Finally, current knowledge on structural and functional brain correlates of these deficits in AUD are reviewed.

RESULTS

Emotional and social-cognitive functions affected in AUD can potentially compromise efforts to initiate and maintain abstinence by hampering efficacy of clinical treatment. Such dysfunction can obstruct efforts to enable or reinstate higher-order abilities such as emotional self-regulation, motivation to change, success in interpersonal/social interactions, and emotional insight and awareness of social dysfunctions (i.e., accurate metacognition).

CONCLUSIONS

The present review highlights the need to account for emotional processing and social cognition in the evaluation and rehabilitation of alcohol-related neurocognitive disorders and to consider psychotherapeutic treatment involving remediation of emotional and social skills as implemented in psychiatric and neurological disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to recognise emotions predicts the time-course of sarcasm processing: Evidence from eye movements

A core feature of sarcasm is that there is a discrepancy between the literal meaning of the utterance and the context in which it is presented. This means that a sarcastic statement embedded in a story introduces a break in local coherence. Previous studies have shown that sarcastic statements in written stories often elicit longer processing times than their literal counterparts, possibly reflecting the difficulty of integrating the statement into the story’s context. In the present study, we examined how sarcastic statements are processed when the location of the local coherence break is manipulated by presenting the sarcastic dialogues either before or after contextual information. In total, 60 participants read short text paragraphs containing sarcastic or literal target statements, while their eye movements were recorded. Individual differences in ability to recognise emotions and working memory capacity were measured. The results suggest that longer reading times with sarcastic statements not only reflect local inconsistency but also attempt to resolve the meaning of the sarcastic statement. The ability to recognise emotions was reflected in eye-movement patterns, suggesting that readers who are poor at recognising emotions are slower at categorising the statement as sarcastic. Thus, they need more processing effort to resolve the sarcastic meaning.

Attenuated impression of irony created by the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal cues in patients with autism spectrum disorder

Perception of irony has been observed to be impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder. In typically developed adults, the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues can be perceived as an expression of irony even in the absence of any further contextual information. In this study, we evaluate to what extent high functioning autists perceive this incongruence as expressing irony. Our results show that incongruent verbal and nonverbal signals create an impression of irony significantly less often in participants with high-functioning autism than in typically developed control subjects. The extent of overall autistic symptomatology as measured with the autism-spectrum questionnaire (AQ), however, does not correlate with the reduced tendency to attribute incongruent stimuli as expressing irony. Therefore, the attenuation in irony attribution might rather be related to specific subdomains of autistic traits, such as a reduced tendency to interpret communicative signals in terms of complex intentional mental states. The observed differences in irony attribution support the assumption that a less pronounced tendency to engage in higher order mentalization processes might underlie the impairment of pragmatic language understanding in high functioning autism.

Automatic visual-spatial perspective taking in alcohol-dependence: A study with happy emotional faces

BACKGROUND

Understanding the world from another's perspective is an important and potentially automatic human process which is crucial for efficient social interactions. However, while deficits have repeatedly been described for various interpersonal abilities in alcohol-dependence (AD), only one previous study has investigated perspective taking in this pathology.

AIM

The current study aimed to explore further how AD affects visual-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) by examining the effect of positive emotional stimuli on VSPT in both an AD and non-AD sample.

METHODS

Reaction times (RT) for simple spatial judgments were measured. Participants made these judgments from their perspective, but judgments were either congruent or incongruent with the perspective of another agent. The emotion conveyed by that agent (happy or neutral) was manipulated across trials.

RESULTS

Compared to baseline, both AD and non-AD groups displayed delayed RTs for spatial judgments when these were incongruent with the perspective of a happy agent (the expected VSPT RT cost, indicating automatic VSPT). The AD, but not the non-AD group, further displayed a VSPT RT cost when the agent expressed a neutral emotion.

CONCLUSION

There was no evidence that AD compromised automatic VSPT. However, as in previous research, AD was associated with differences in the processing of emotional stimuli. Future research should explore which 'real-world' settings are likely to trigger social confusion and misunderstanding.

Aspects of alcohol use disorder affecting social cognition as assessed using the Mini Social and Emotional Assessment (mini-SEA)

BACKGROUND

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is associated with problems with processing complex social scenarios. Little is known about the relationship between distinct AUD-related factors (e.g., years of problematic drinking), aspects of cognitive function and dysfunction in individuals diagnosed with AUD, and the relative impact these may have on social cognition.

AIMS

To explore differences in social cognition between a group of participants diagnosed with AUD and controls, using a clinical measure, the Mini Social and Emotional Assessment (mini-SEA). The mini-SEA was used to evaluate social and emotional understanding through a facial emotional recognition task and by utilising a series of social scenes some of which contain a faux pas (social error).

METHODS

Eighty-five participants (individuals with AUD and controls) completed demographic questions and a general cognitive and social cognitive test battery over three consecutive days.

RESULTS

Between group analyses revealed that the participants with AUD performed less well on the faux pas test, and differences were also revealed in the emotional facial recognition task. Years of problematic alcohol consumption was the strongest predictor of poor ToM reasoning.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest a strong link between AUD chronicity and social cognition, though the direction of this relationship needs further elucidation. This may be of clinical relevance to abstinence and relapse management, as basic social cognition skills and ability to maintain interpersonal relationships are likely to be crucial to recovery.

Dysfunctional Early Processing of Facial Expressions in Hazardous Drinkers: Evidence from an ERP Study

Chronic alcohol intoxication impairs multiple cognitive functions. According to the dual system model (DSM), the development of alcohol dependence (AD) involves the imbalance between the automatic-affective system and the reflective system. However, the cognitive functions of non-AD hazardous drinkers (HDs) remain unclear. The present study aimed to explore how the HDs process facial expressions differently from the healthy subjects. Sixteen HDs and seventeen control subjects (CSs) completed an emotional working memory (WM) task while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We found that there was no significant group difference in behavioral performance between the two groups. In the ERP data, relative to the CSs, the HDs showed delayed latencies of P1 and N170. Moreover, the CSs showed significant differences between the amplitudes of neural/fear and disgust expressions while these differences were insignificant in the HDs. The current results suggest that the main deficits in the processing of facial expression in HDs existed in the early automatic-affective system instead of in the reflective system.

Crossmodal processing of emotions in alcohol-dependence and Korsakoff syndrome

INTRODUCTION

Decoding emotional information from faces and voices is crucial for efficient interpersonal communication. Emotional decoding deficits have been found in alcohol-dependence (ALC), particularly in crossmodal situations (with simultaneous stimulations from different modalities), but are still underexplored in Korsakoff syndrome (KS). The aim of this study is to determine whether the continuity hypothesis, postulating a gradual worsening of cognitive and brain impairments from ALC to KS, is valid for emotional crossmodal processing.

METHODS

Sixteen KS, 17 ALC and 19 matched healthy controls (CP) had to detect the emotion (anger or happiness) displayed by auditory, visual or crossmodal auditory-visual stimuli. Crossmodal stimuli were either emotionally congruent (leading to a facilitation effect, i.e. enhanced performance for crossmodal condition compared to unimodal ones) or incongruent (leading to an interference effect, i.e. decreased performance for crossmodal condition due to discordant information across modalities). Reaction times and accuracy were recorded.

RESULTS

Crossmodal integration for congruent information was dampened only in ALC, while both ALC and KS demonstrated, compared to CP, decreased performance for decoding emotional facial expressions in the incongruent condition.

CONCLUSIONS

The crossmodal integration appears impaired in ALC but preserved in KS. Both alcohol-related disorders present an increased interference effect. These results show the interest of more ecological designs, using crossmodal stimuli, to explore emotional decoding in alcohol-related disorders. They also suggest that the continuum hypothesis cannot be generalised to emotional decoding abilities.

Executive Functions, Memory, and Social Cognitive Deficits and Recovery in Chronic Alcoholism: A Critical Review to Inform Future Research

Alcoholism is a complex and dynamic disease, punctuated by periods of abstinence and relapse, and influenced by a multitude of vulnerability factors. Chronic excessive alcohol consumption is associated with cognitive deficits, ranging from mild to severe, in executive functions, memory, and metacognitive abilities, with associated impairment in emotional processes and social cognition. These deficits can compromise efforts in initiating and sustaining abstinence by hampering efficacy of clinical treatment and can obstruct efforts in enabling good decision making success in interpersonal/social interactions, and awareness of cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions. Despite evidence for differences in recovery levels of selective cognitive processes, certain deficits can persist even with prolonged sobriety. Herein is presented a review of alcohol-related cognitive impairments affecting component processes of executive functioning, memory, and the recently investigated cognitive domains of metamemory, social cognition, and emotional processing; also considered are trajectories of cognitive recovery with abstinence. Finally, in the spirit of critical review, limitations of current knowledge are noted and avenues for new research efforts are proposed that focus on (i) the interaction among emotion-cognition processes and identification of vulnerability factors contributing to the development of emotional and social processing deficits and (ii) the time line of cognitive recovery by tracking alcoholism's dynamic course of sobriety and relapse. Knowledge about the heterochronicity of cognitive recovery in alcoholism has the potential of indicating at which points during recovery intervention may be most beneficial.

Heterogeneity of emotional and interpersonal difficulties in alcohol-dependence: A cluster analytic approach

BACKGROUND

Emotional and interpersonal impairments have been largely reported in alcohol-dependence, and their role in its development and maintenance is widely established. However, earlier studies have exclusively focused on group comparisons between healthy controls and alcohol-dependent individuals, considering them as a homogeneous population. The variability of socio-emotional profiles in this disorder thus remains totally unexplored. The present study used a cluster analytic approach to explore the heterogeneity of affective and social disorders in alcohol-dependent individuals.

METHODS

296 recently-detoxified alcohol-dependent patients were first compared with 246 matched healthy controls regarding self-reported emotional (i.e. alexithymia) and social (i.e. interpersonal problems) difficulties. Then, a cluster analysis was performed, focusing on the alcohol-dependent sample, to explore the presence of differential patterns of socio-emotional deficits and their links with demographic, psychopathological and alcohol-related variables.

RESULTS

The group comparison between alcohol-dependent individuals and controls clearly confirmed that emotional and interpersonal difficulties constitute a key factor in alcohol-dependence. However, the cluster analysis identified five subgroups of alcohol-dependent individuals, presenting distinct combinations of alexithymia and interpersonal problems ranging from a total absence of reported impairment to generalized socio-emotional difficulties.

CONCLUSIONS

Alcohol-dependent individuals should no more be considered as constituting a unitary group regarding their affective and interpersonal difficulties, but rather as a population encompassing a wide variety of socio-emotional profiles. Future experimental studies on emotional and social variables should thus go beyond mere group comparisons to explore this heterogeneity, and prevention programs proposing an individualized evaluation and rehabilitation of these deficits should be promoted.

Empathy, and its relationship with cognitive and emotional functions in alcohol dependency

BACKGROUND

Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand the other's thoughts and feelings. It contains both cognitive and emotional components.

AIMS

The aim of this study was to investigate the empathy ability of patients with alcohol dependency in association with cognitive and emotional functions, after acute detoxification and during long-term abstinence.

METHODS

Thirty-three alcohol dependent inpatients that completed a detoxification process and stayed abstinent throughout the study, and 33 healthy comparison subjects that matched the patients for age, gender, and education level were included in the study. All the participants were administered the Facial Emotion Identification Test (FEIT), Facial Emotion Discrimination Test (FEDT), Trail Making Test (TMT), Digit Span Test (DST), Auditory Consonant Trigram Test (ACT), and Empathy Quotient Scale (EQS). All the tests were repeated after 3 months of abstinence.

RESULTS

At the first evaluation conducted after detoxification, patients performed significantly worse than healthy comparisons in almost all tests. At the second evaluation, which was conducted after 3 months of abstinence, the patients improved significantly in all measures, and no significant differences were detected between the patient and comparison groups. There were significant correlations between the test scores and EQS score.

CONCLUSIONS

Alcohol dependency has deleterious effects on empathy ability, and cognitive and emotional functions. Those impairments can improve with abstinence. Empathy ability has strong relationships with cognitive and emotional functions.

Preserved Affective Sharing But Impaired Decoding of Contextual Complex Emotions in Alcohol Dependence

BACKGROUND

Prior research has repeatedly shown that alcohol dependence is associated with a large range of impairments in psychological processes, which could lead to interpersonal deficits. Specifically, it has been suggested that these interpersonal difficulties are underpinned by reduced recognition and sharing of others' emotional states. However, this pattern of deficits remains to be clarified. This study thus aimed to investigate whether alcohol dependence is associated with impaired abilities in decoding contextual complex emotions and with altered sharing of others' emotions.

METHODS

Forty-one alcohol-dependent individuals (ADI) and 37 matched healthy individuals completed the Multifaceted Empathy Test, in which they were instructed to identify complex emotional states expressed by individuals in contextual scenes and to state to what extent they shared them.

RESULTS

Compared to healthy individuals, ADI were impaired in identifying negative (Cohen's d = 0.75) and positive (Cohen's d = 0.46) emotional states but, conversely, presented preserved abilities in sharing others' emotional states.

CONCLUSIONS

This study shows that alcohol dependence is characterized by an impaired ability to decode complex emotional states (both positive and negative), despite the presence of complementary contextual cues, but by preserved emotion-sharing. Therefore, these results extend earlier data describing an impaired ability to decode noncontextualized emotions toward contextualized and ecologically valid emotional states. They also indicate that some essential emotional competences such as emotion-sharing are preserved in alcohol dependence, thereby offering potential therapeutic levers.

Effects of Emotional Intelligence on the Impression of Irony Created by the Mismatch between Verbal and Nonverbal Cues

Emotional information is conveyed through verbal and nonverbal signals, with nonverbal cues often being considered the decisive factor in the judgment of others' emotional states. The aim of the present study was to examine how verbal and nonverbal cues are integrated by perceivers. More specifically, we tested whether the mismatch between verbal and nonverbal information was perceived as an expression of irony. Moreover, we investigated the effects of emotional intelligence on the impression of irony. The findings revealed that the mismatch between verbal and nonverbal information created the impression of irony. Furthermore, participants higher in emotional intelligence were faster at rating such stimuli as ironic expressions.

The effect of alcohol dependence on automatic visuo-spatial perspective taking

BACKGROUND

Alcoholism is associated with cognitive deficits that affect social functioning. Previous research has shown that alcoholism is associated with deficits in conscious, deliberate social processing. However, little is known about whether alcoholism also affects rapid, spontaneous processing. We therefore investigated the extent to which alcoholism affects the ability to spontaneously adopt the viewpoint of another in a visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) task.

METHODS

VSPT was measured in participants responding to a dot probe presented for 35ms alongside neutral faces, fearful faces and baseline stimuli (rectangles).

RESULTS

Non alcohol dependent participants showed the standard reaction time cost to fearful faces, but not neutral faces relative to baseline. However, Alcohol dependent (AD) participants showed a reaction time cost to both fearful and neutral faces.

CONCLUSIONS

AD participants are not impaired in their ability to automatically adopt the perspective of another. However, unlike non-AD participants, they show automatic perspective taking to both neutral and fearful faces.

Cognition, emotion, and attention

Deficits of attention, emotion, and cognition occur in individuals with alcohol abuse and addiction. This review elucidates the concepts of attention, emotion, and cognition and references research on the underlying neural networks and their compromise in alcohol use disorder. Neuroimaging research on adolescents with family history of alcoholism contributes to the understanding of pre-existing brain structural conditions and characterization of cognition and attention processes in high-risk individuals. Attention and cognition interact with other brain functions, including perceptual selection, salience, emotion, reward, and memory, through interconnected neural networks. Recent research reports compromised microstructural and functional network connectivity in alcoholism, which can have an effect on the dynamic tuning between brain systems, e.g., the frontally based executive control system, the limbic emotion system, and the midbrain-striatal reward system, thereby impeding cognitive flexibility and behavioral adaptation to changing environments. Finally, we introduce concepts of functional compensation, the capacity to generate attentional resources for performance enhancement, and brain structure recovery with abstinence. An understanding of the neural mechanisms of attention, emotion, and cognition will likely provide the basis for better treatment strategies for developing skills that enhance alcoholism therapy adherence and quality of life, and reduce the propensity for relapse.

Below and beyond the recognition of emotional facial expressions in alcohol dependence: from basic perception to social cognition

Studies that have carried out experimental evaluation of emotional skills in alcohol-dependence have, up to now, been mainly focused on the exploration of emotional facial expressions (EFE) decoding. In the present paper, we provide some complements to the recent systematic literature review published by Donadon and de Lima Osório on this crucial topic. We also suggest research avenues that must be, in our opinion, considered in the coming years. More precisely, we propose, first, that a battery integrating a set of emotional tasks relating to different processes should be developed to better systemize EFE decoding measures in alcohol-dependence. Second, we propose to go below EFE recognition deficits and to seek for the roots of those alterations, particularly by investigating the putative role played by early visual processing and vision-emotion interactions in the emotional impairment observed in alcohol-dependence. Third, we insist on the need to go beyond EFE recognition deficits by suggesting that they only constitute a part of wider emotional deficits in alcohol-dependence. Importantly, since the efficient decoding of emotions is a crucial ability for the development and maintenance of satisfactory interpersonal relationships, we suggest that disruption of this ability in alcohol-dependent individuals may have adverse consequences for their social integration. One way to achieve this research agenda would be to develop the field of affective and social neuroscience of alcohol-dependence, which could ultimately lead to major advances at both theoretical and therapeutic levels.

Experimental and clinical usefulness of crossmodal paradigms in psychiatry: an illustration from emotional processing in alcohol-dependence

Crossmodal processing (i.e., the construction of a unified representation stemming from distinct sensorial modalities inputs) constitutes a crucial ability in humans' everyday life. It has been extensively explored at cognitive and cerebral levels during the last decade among healthy controls. Paradoxically however, and while difficulties to perform this integrative process have been suggested in a large range of psychopathological states (e.g., schizophrenia and autism), these crossmodal paradigms have been very rarely used in the exploration of psychiatric populations. The main aim of the present paper is thus to underline the experimental and clinical usefulness of exploring crossmodal processes in psychiatry. We will illustrate this proposal by means of the recent data obtained in the crossmodal exploration of emotional alterations in alcohol-dependence. Indeed, emotional decoding impairments might have a role in the development and maintenance of alcohol-dependence, and have been extensively investigated by means of experiments using separated visual or auditory stimulations. Besides these unimodal explorations, we have recently conducted several studies using audio-visual crossmodal paradigms, which has allowed us to improve the ecological validity of the unimodal experimental designs and to offer new insights on the emotional alterations among alcohol-dependent individuals. We will show how these preliminary results can be extended to develop a coherent and ambitious research program using crossmodal designs in various psychiatric populations and sensory modalities. We will finally end the paper by underlining the various potential clinical applications and the fundamental implications that can be raised by this emerging project.