This study sought to differentiate alcoholism-related changes in judgments of emotional stimuli from those of other populations in which such changes have been documented. Two sets of visual stimuli, one containing words and the other containing drawings of faces (representing a range of emotional content), were presented to abstinent alcoholic adults with and without Korsakoff's syndrome, as well as to a healthy control group and four groups of patients with other neurobehavioral disorders: Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Participants rated the stimuli according to emotional valence and intensity of emotion. Results implicated bi-hemispheric frontal and subcortical involvement in the abnormalities of emotion identification associated with alcoholism, and they also support the notion of age-related vulnerabilities in conjunction with alcoholism. Keywords alcoholism; aging; Korsakoff's syndrome; emotion; neurobehavioral disorders Emotional changes that accompany long-term chronic alcoholism cover a broad spectrum (National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 1997) and have significant social and interpersonal significance (Kornreich et al., 2002). Among the abnormalities are affective processing deficits such as a diminished ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion (Howard, Oscar-Berman, Marinkovic, O'Reilly, & Harris, 2003;Kornreich et al., 2002;Philippot et al., 1999;Townshend & Duka, 2003) and reduced ability to decipher affective prosody in spoken language (Monnot, Nixon, Lovallo, & Ross, 2001). The abnormalities in Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marlene Oscar-Berman, Boston University School of Medicine L-815, 715 Albany Street, Boston, MA 02118. oscar@bu.edu. Uraina S. Clark, Department of Psychology, Boston University; Marlene Oscar-Berman, Departments of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Psychiatry, and Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, and Psychology Research Service, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Boston Campus; Barbara Shagrin, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Boston Campus; Michael Pencina, Department of Mathematics, Boston University.
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Author ManuscriptNeuropsychology. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 July 08.
NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript emotional perception have been attributed to a combination of underlying factors, for example, visuospatial deficits, abnormal processing of social information, poor inhibitory control, and interpersonal stress (Moselhy, Georgiou, & Kahn, 2001;Philippot et al., 1999). Brain changes associated with these deficits include pathology of frontosubcortical and limbic systems or disturbances in the functioning of the right hemisphere (Bowirrat & Oscar-Berman, 2005;. For example, it has been suggested that alcoholic individuals' tendencies to overestimate facial emotions could be related to interference with frontally mediated disinhibition proces...
