As there are independent reports that alcohol dependence and antisocial personality pathology (particularly psychopathy) are associated with impaired face affect recognition, we examined the relationship between antisocial personality traits and face affect recognition in 23 detoxified inpatient alcohol abusers and 26 healthy controls. All participants were rated on the Antisocial Personality Questionnaire (APQ), and the alcohol abuse sample was rated on the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version. A computerized face affect recognition task was used to assess the six basic emotions. Overall, alcohol abusers were significantly worse than healthy controls at recognizing emotional facial expression, particularly anger and sadness. Recognition of disgust was negatively correlated with psychopathy (particularly the social deviance factor) and with several subscales of the impulsivity/hostility factor on the APQ. Fear recognition was also negatively correlated with a number of APQ subscales within the impulsive/hostility factor. Our findings point to the importance of assessing co-morbid antisocial personality pathology in studies looking at face affect recognition deficits in substance abusers. The work also suggests that the interpersonal difficulties seen in some alcohol abusers may be related to impairments in emotional information that are primarily due to co-morbid personality pathology. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.
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