A mixed cross-sectional and longitudinal study of EFE processing found no improvement in decoding of happiness, anger, sadness and disgust over 3 months of abstinence (Foisy et al., 2007a), where the poorer the EFE recognition at the beginning of abstinence, the less likely abstinence would be maintained. In the current study, emotion identification accuracy did not differ between groups. The high (93%) accuracy rates across conditions may indicate a ceiling effect. Incorporating distracters, decreasing target discriminability and/or increasing stimulus presentation rates may unmask such effects in future studies. Studies that include a wider variety of emotional stimuli (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, contempt, surprise, disgust, shame) and more than one level of stimulus intensity (30%, 70%) have shown such effects in alcoholics (Kornreich et al., 2001, Frigerio et al., 2002, Foisy et al., 2007a). But other studies have not found group differences in performance between alcoholics and NAC (Maurage et al., 2007a, 2008a, 2008c).
