Emotional Perception in alcoholism

CARMONA-PERERA, MARTINA; SUMARROCA-HERNANDEZ, X; SANTOLARIA-ROSSELL, A; VERDEJO-GARCIA, A; PILATTI, ANGELINA

Congreso; 2011 Meeting of the Latin American Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism; 2011

Introduction. Studies of emotion emphasize the central role of emotional perception in social live of people, allowing a correct interpersonal interaction. Drug dependent patients have showed a dysfunction in the ability to perceive emotions from facial expressions of other people (Kemmis, Hall, Kingston & Morgan, 2007; Verdejo-García et al., 2007); however there isn’t research on emotional perception in alcoholism. Objective. Therefore, the aim of this study was to research possible alterations in the emotional perception of patients with alcoholism and determinate if this dysfunction depending on the type of emotion perceived. Methods. The preliminary sample involved 15 alcoholics and 15 non-alcoholics equal in age and gender variables. We administered Ekman 60 Faces Test (Perrett, Calder, Sprengelmeyer & Etcoff, 2002) in which show a set of faces expressing one of the six basic emotions postulated by Ekman (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust) and the participants must identify. We conducted a t-test for dependent samples analysis including group (alcoholics vs. non-alcoholics) as factor, and the score on the Ekman’s test as dependent variable. Results. Results showed significant withing-group differences in the total score (F (30, 26 639) 1180) as well as the partial scores of anger (F (30, 21 708) 5890) , disgust (F (30, 26 308) 4214), fear (F (30, 29 756) 0.424) and  surprise (F (30, 19 517) 13 943), obtaining significantly lower scores drinkers. Respect sadness and happiness emotions, both groups scored very similar and the differences were not significant. Conclusions. In conclusion, this research is evidence of perceptual disturbance of emotions in alcohol consumers, showing a difficulty to perceive anger, disgust, fear and surprise. This dysfunction in emotional perception may be related to social interaction problems presented in alcoholism.