Emotional Face Processing among Treatment-Seeking Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders: Investigating Sex Differences and Relationships with Interpersonal Functioning

Background: Individuals in treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) display deficits across a broad range of cognitive processes. Disruptions in affective processing are understudied, but may be particularly important for interpersonal functioning and post-treatment adaptation. In particular, the role of sex in AUD-associated emotion processing deficits remains largely unaddressed and was a focus of the current investigation. Methods: Fifty-six treatment seekers with AUD and 54 healthy community controls (N = 110) were administered an emotional face discrimination task. Non-affective tasks included a sex-discrimination task and two brief measures of executive functioning. Two measures of interpersonal function were included. Results: Emotion processing deficits were evident among women with AUD relative to other groups. This sex-contingent relationship was not observed in measures of executive function, sexdiscrimination or interpersonal problems, although individuals with AUD performed more poorly on these measures. Conclusions: Results were consistent with extant literatures examining cognitive, affective and interpersonal functioning among individuals with AUD, and provided novel evidence of vulnerability to alcohol-associated deficits in emotion processing among women. While similar sexcontingent effects were not apparent among other measures, results support modest interrelationships, specifically including the import of emotion processing to interpersonal functioning in AUD. These data offer guidance for further systematic investigation and highlight important considerations for future relapse-prevention and recovery-facilitation efforts.