Alcoholics have impairments in cognitive processing of emotional signals. They seem to know what to do in interpersonal situations, but their social skills are impaired, and many are unable to implement the strategies they recommend for themselves (Gaffney et al 1998). More specifically, they exhibit deficits in decoding affective prosody, a non-linguistic aspect of language that conveys emotion and attitude during discourse (Monot et al 2001). Monot et al (2001) reported that alcoholics were deficient in the ability to detect emotion/attitude in someone’s voice, and Kornreich et al (2002) confirmed that alcoholics are impaired in emotional processing such as interpreting non-verbal emotional cues and recognizing facial expressions of emotion (Philippot et al 1999; Kringelbach et al 2001; Kornreich et al 2001, 2002; Indersmitten et al 2003). Using computer images and different intensities of morphed facial expressions, Kornreich and co-workers found that alcoholics overestimated the intensity of all emotional expressions, misinterpreted emotional expressions (except fear) at all levels of intensity, and were unaware of their misperceptions (Philippot et al 1999). Oscar-Berman et al (1990) also reported that, compared with nonalcoholic controls,
