Alcoholics exhibit deficits in several aspects of emotional functioning. Research on the perception and decoding of emotional expressions has shown that alcoholics are impaired in perceiving emotions in facial expressions (Philippot et al., 1999; Kornreich et al., 2001; Kornreich et al., 2002; Maurage et al., 2008; Maurage et al., 2009) and in recognizing emotional prosody in speech — a non-linguistic aspect of language that conveys the speaker’s feelings and attitudes (Oscar-Berman et al., 1990a; Monnot et al., 2001; Monnot et al., 2002). For example, Oscar-Berman et al. (1990a) reported that alcoholics had difficulty judging emotional intonations and emotional semantic content of spoken sentences, and Monnot et al. (2001, 2002) found that alcoholics were deficient in the ability to detect emotion and attitude in the voice. These findings indicate a defect in decoding affective prosody. Uekermann et al. (2005) reported that alcoholics were impaired in identifying semantic content when it did not match affective prosody and in matching affective prosody to facial expressions, deficits that may be related to cross-modal difficulties (Oscar-Berman et al., 1990b; Maurage et al., 2007; Maurage et
