Abstract
Emotional visual perception deficits constitute a major problem in alcohol-dependence. Indeed, the ability to assess the affective content of external cues is a key adaptive function, as it allows on the one hand the processing of potentially threatening or advantageous stimuli, and on the other hand the establishment of appropriate social interactions (by enabling rapid decoding of the affective state of others from their facial expressions). While such deficits have been classically considered as reflecting a genuine emotion decoding impairment in alcohol-dependence, converging evidence suggests that underlying visual deficits might play a role in emotional alterations. This hypothesis appears to be relevant especially as data from healthy populations indicate that a coarse but fast analysis of visual inputs would allow emotional processing to arise from early stages of perception. After reviewing those findings and the associated models, the present paper underlines data showing that rapid interactions between emotion and vision could be impaired in alcohol-dependence and provides new research avenues that may ultimately offer a better understanding of the roots of emotional deficits in this pathological state.
Highlights
Alcohol-dependence, which constitutes one of the main public health concerns worldwide (World Health Organization, 2011), is known to be associated with large-scale cerebral impairments (Bühler and Mann, 2011), notably leading to decrements in emotional abilities
PERSPECTIVES AND CONCLUSION On the basis of data reviewed above and questions raised, the main research avenues that should be addressed in the following years will be described, by showing how alcohol-dependence may constitute a relevant psychopathological model to test the affective prediction model, and how this model could help to understand the roots of emotion decoding deficits among alcohol-dependent individuals (ADIs)
MC VERSUS PC PATHWAYS The relative magnitude of emotional processing deficits as a function of PC versus MC pathways should be investigated among ADI
Summary
Alcohol-dependence, which constitutes one of the main public health concerns worldwide (World Health Organization, 2011), is known to be associated with large-scale cerebral impairments (Bühler and Mann, 2011), notably leading to decrements in emotional abilities. Emotional deficits have been widely described (Philippot et al, 1999; Maurage et al, 2012) among alcohol-dependent individuals (ADIs) and play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of this disease (Zywiak et al, 2003; Clark et al, 2007) These deficits have been repeatedly reported for the decoding of emotional facial expressions (EFEs; Philippot et al, 1999; Kornreich et al, 2001; Maurage et al, 2008a,b,c, 2009) and appear to be generalized to all types of emotional visual stimuli, including emotional body postures (Maurage et al, 2009). We propose new research avenues to offer a better understanding of the roots of emotional deficits in alcohol-dependence
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