The auditory-visual integration of anger is impaired in alcoholism: an event-related potentials study

J Psychiatry Neurosci 2008;33(2):111-22.

Chronic alcoholism leads to impaired visual and auditory processing of emotions, but the cross-modal (auditory-visual) processing of emotional stimuli has not yet been explored. Our objectives were to describe the electrophysiological correlates of unimodal (visual and auditory) impairments in emotion processing in people suffering from alcoholism, to determine whether this deficit is general or emotion-specific, and to explore potential deterioration in the specific cross-modal integration processes in alcoholism.

These results suggest that the specific deficit that people with alcoholism demonstrate in processing anger stimuli, widely described in clinical situations but not clearly identified in earlier studies (using unimodal stimuli), is particularly obvious during cross-modal processing, which is more common than unimodal processing in everyday life.

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