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Emotional and interpersonal deficits in alcohol-dependen A neuroscience perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

P. Maurage
P. Maurage*
Affiliation:
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), institut de recherche en sciences psychologiques (IPSY), laboratoire de psychopathologie expérimentale (LEP), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
*
*E-mail address: pierre.maurage@uclouvain.be

Abstract

The cerebral and cognitive consequences of alcohol-dependence have been widely explored during the last decades, but the emotional and interpersonal alterations associated with this psychiatric state have only been described recently. In view of the implication of these deficits in relapse after detoxification and of their omnipresence in clinical settings, there is an urgent need to further study these affective and social deficits presented by alcohol-dependent individuals. The present communication aims at offering a summary of the available empirical results on this topic and at underlining the usefulness of a multidisciplinary neuroscience approach to better understand these alterations. The initial studies, focusing on emotion decoding abilities, will first be described as they clearly established that alcohol-dependence is associated with a massive deficit in the identification of the emotional content of faces. The causal link between emotional alterations and alcohol-related problems will also be evoked, with a special focus on recent studies exploring the roots of alcohol-dependence. We will then show how more recent studies have capitalized on these first results to further explore affective and social abilities in alcohol-dependence, leading to the current development of a new research field: the affective and social neurosciences of alcohol-dependence, which combines neuroscience approaches by integrating neuropsychological, electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. Finally, we will identify the main fundamental and clinical perspectives in this field, and we will particularly insist on: (1) the need to take the emotional and social impairments into account in the new theoretical models of addictive states and; (2) the urgency to develop neuropsychological programs specifically dedicated to the rehabilitation of these deficits.

Keywords

Alcohol-dependenceEmotionsInterpersonal processusIRMfPotentiels évoqués
Type
R13
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 29 , Issue S3: Hors-série 1 – 6ème Congrès Français de Psychiatrie – Nice, novembre 2014 , November 2014 , pp. 533
Copyright
Copyright © European Psychiatric Association 2014

Disclosure of interest

The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest concerning this article.

Further reading

References

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