Cross-modal processing of emotions in severe alcohol use disorders: Impaired discrimination of anger and fear under dynamic audiovisual conditions

Abstract

Severe alcohol use disorders (SAUD) are associated with a large variety of affective disturbances, among which a well-established decoding deficit for facial and vocal emotional expressions. This deficit has recently been found to be increased in cross-modal settings, namely when inputs from different sensory modalities have to be combined. Compared to unimodal emotional stimuli, cross-modal ones allow for faster and more accurate emotional predictions, and therefore constitute critical cues for social interactions. However, so far, studies exploring emotional cross-modal processing in SAUD relied on static faces, associated with voices from a different individual, largely hampering ecological validity. Besides, in real life conditions, emotions are often not fully expressed, so that we have to make guesses based on incomplete information. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to assess cross-modal emotional processing using a new ecological paradigm with dynamic audiovisual stimuli, manipulating the amount of emotional information available to the individual. Thirty individuals with SAUD and 30 matched healthy controls performed an emotional discrimination task requiring to identify emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) expressed in short movies containing visual, auditory or auditory-visual information of various durations. The shortest excerpts revealed the very early emotional sketch (i.e., initial facial movements and prosody) while the longest ones depicted a more complete emotion. Sensitivity analyses (d’) showed that discrimination levels varied across sensory modalities and emotions, and increased with stimuli duration in both groups. Individuals with SAUD's performances improved from unimodal to cross-modal conditions, but their discrimination for cross-modal stimuli was impaired for anger and fear. This deficit was not influenced by the amount of information displayed, suggesting that it persists even when more emotional information is available. Results are discussed in light of the predictive mechanisms underlying emotion recognition, and converge with earlier findings to ascribe a specific role for anger and fear in SAUD.