There are four major limitations of this study. First, stimuli were presented for two relatively low arousal emotions. It is possible that higher arousal emotions such as anger, surprise and fear might have triggered stronger and more varied ERP effects (Marinkovic and Halgren, 1998, Balconi and Pozzoli, 2003). Second, the gender task was always presented first, and task and order are confounded. Third, in the ERP analysis, we focused primarily on the midline P160 component. Other peaks and laterality effects can be elicited by facial stimuli, (Marinkovic and Halgren, 1998) and will be the focus of another paper. Fourth, as mentioned above, our conclusions are limited by the groups studied. Without further samples we cannot distinguish between the contributions of the predisposition to alcoholism, the effects of chronic alcoholism, and the effects of long-term abstinence to our results.
