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Updated: May 21, 2026

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Impaired processing of emotion in music, faces and voices supports a generalized emotional decoding deficit in
Charles Kornreich1, Damien Brevers, Delphine Canivet
1Laboratoire de Psychologie Médicale et d'Addictologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. ckornrei@ulb.ac.be
Aim:
To test the generalized emotional decoding impairment hypothesis in alcoholism.
Design:
Cross-sectional behavioural study comparing emotion recognition conveyed by faces, voices and musical excerpts.
Setting:
Alcohol detoxification unit of Brugmann University Hospital.
Participants:
Twenty-five recently detoxified alcohol-dependent patients were compared to 25 normal controls matched for sex, age and educational level.
Measurements:
From faces, voices and musical excerpts, participants were instructed to rate the intensity of several emotions on a scale from 0 for 'absent' to 9 for 'highly present'. Depression, anxiety and sustained/selective attention capacities were controlled for.
Findings:
Alcohol-dependent patients were less accurate than controls in identifying the target emotion in faces (P < 0.001), voices (P < 0.001) and musical excerpts (P < 0.001).
Conclusions:
Alcohol-dependent patients who are completing detoxification are impaired in recognizing emotions conveyed by faces, voices and music; these results suggest a generalized emotional decoding impairment. Hypothetically, deficits in the fronto-parietal mirror neurone system could link all these disturbances together.
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