Gender moderates the association between acute alcohol intoxication and facial emotion recognition in a naturalistic...

Alcohol intoxication is associated with significant negative social consequences. Social information processing theory provides a framework for understanding how the accurate decoding and interpretation of social cues are critical for effective social responding. Acute intoxication has the potential to disrupt facial emotion recognition. If alcohol impairs the processing and interpretation of emotional cues, then the resultant behavioral responses may be less effective. The current study tested the association between alcohol intoxication and facial emotion recognition in a naturalistic field study of intoxicated participants.

114 participants (59.4% men; M_age  = 24.2 years) who had been consuming alcohol were recruited in the downtown area of a mid-size town surrounded by several drinking establishments in the mid-southern United States. Participants were shown images depicting 5 facial displays of emotions (happy, sad, anger, disgust, and no emotion) portrayed by 1 male and 1 female actor per emotion and breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) was measured by the field breathalyzer test (M = 0.078%, SD = 0.052).

BrAC was significantly negatively associated with emotion recognition accuracy when controlling for average alcohol use, B = -.35, t = -2.08, p < 0.05, F(3, 110) = 5.28, p < 0.01, R²  = 0.13. A significant BrAC × gender interaction was revealed, B = -0.39, t = -2.07, p = 0.04, ΔR²  = 0.033, p = 0.04, such that men (but not women) displayed a significant negative association between BrAC and emotion recognition accuracy.

Acute intoxication was associated with impaired facial emotion recognition, particularly for men, in a field study context. Findings support and extend some previous experimental laboratory-based research and suggest that intoxication can impair the decoding stage of social information processing.