[Commentary] ALCOHOL AND FRONTAL LOBE IMPAIRMENT: FASCINATING FINDINGSAddiction Volume 103 Issue 5 Page 736-737, May 2008
What Uekermann and Daum have done in their excellent paper is to specify in more detail the ways in which frontal lobe dysfunction affects social cognition. For example, they have reviewed evidence that alcoholics take longer to decode emotional facial expressions than healthy comparison groups. Not only that, but alcoholics over-estimate the intensity of emotions, and they show a clear bias towards mislabelling sad expressions as hostile. They tend to judge a happy face as reflecting a negative mood state, and fear responses are enhanced. There is some evidence that the decoding of facial expressions improves following abstinence in parallel with improvements in cognitive function, but this is not always seen. Somewhat similarly, alcoholic patients show deficits in identifying the affective component of speech prosody. The association between such impairments and interpersonal problems may predispose to relapse.
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