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At a recent event I got into a discussion with a speaker about how taking drugs might impact on a person’s ability to recognise emotion in other people.

Well there is some evidence to support this.  The speaker was relativly new to the subject and asked if I would prepare a short paper outlining some of the studies that have looked at this.

Well I wrote the paper and thought it may be of interest to readers of the blog:

Substance misuse and recognition of emotion in others

The production and recognition of emotional facial expression (EFE) serves an important, controllable, communicatory function that is a key component of social cognition, interaction and behavioural learning (Blair, 2003; Coupland, Singh, Sustrik, Ting, & Blair, 2003; Ekman, 1997).  Research has identified six basic EFEs that can be recognised consistently across cultures: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise (Ekman, et al., 1987).

Several exceptions to theories suggesting that EFE recognition is universal to all have developed, these exceptions cross fields of study including substance misuse, psychiatry and neuropsychology.

Research has shown that impairments and attenuations in the ability of individuals to consistently recognise specific facial expressions have been linked to a wider range of behavioural, psychiatric and neurological disorders (Addington & Addington, 1998; Bozikas, Kosmidis, Anezoulaki, Giannakou, & Karavatos, 2004; Dujardin, et al., 2004; Sprengelmeyer, et al., 1997).  Furthermore, certain brain areas have been identified as important neurological substrates of individual emotions, in particular those of anger, disgust, and fear (Adolphs, 2002; Critchley, 2003; Critchley, et al., 2005).

Substance misuse has been shown to have multiple dynamic effects on recognition of emotion, research has found that chronic use of alcohol (Townshend & Duka, 2003) and opiates (Kornreich, et al., 2003) are implicated in impairments to the individual’s ability to recognise anger and disgust, whilst heavy use of psychostimulants relate to deficits in the recognition of fear (Hoshi, Bisla, & Curran, 2004; Kemmis, Hall, Kingston, & Morgan, 2007).

References

Addington, J., & Addington, D. (1998). Facial affect recognition and information processing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Schizophr Res, 32(3), 171-181.

Adolphs, R. (2002). Neural systems for recognizing emotion. Curr Opin Neurobiol, 12(2), 169-177.

Blair, R. J. (2003). Facial expressions, their communicatory functions and neuro-cognitive substrates. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 358(1431), 561-572.

Bozikas, V. P., Kosmidis, M. H., Anezoulaki, D., Giannakou, M., & Karavatos, A. (2004). Relationship of affect recognition with psychopathology and cognitive performance in schizophrenia. J Int Neuropsychol Soc, 10(4), 549-558.

Coupland, N. J., Singh, A. J., Sustrik, R. A., Ting, P., & Blair, R. (2003). Effects of diazepam on facial emotion recognition. J Psychiatry Neurosci, 28(6), 452-463.

Critchley, H. D. (2003). Emotion and its disorders. Br Med Bull, 65, 35-47.

Critchley, H. D., Rotshtein, P., Nagai, Y., O’Doherty, J., Mathias, C. J., & Dolan, R. J. (2005). Activity in the human brain predicting differential heart rate responses to emotional facial expressions. Neuroimage, 24(3), 751-762.

Dujardin, K., Blairy, S., Defebvre, L., Duhem, S., Noel, Y., Hess, U., et al. (2004). Deficits in decoding emotional facial expressions in Parkinson’s disease. Neuropsychologia, 42(2), 239-250.

Ekman, P. (1997). Should we call it expression or communication? Innovations Social Sci. Res. , 10, 333-344.

Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., O’Sullivan, M., Chan, A., Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, I., Heider, K., et al. (1987). Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. J Pers Soc Psychol, 53(4), 712-717.

Hoshi, R., Bisla, J., & Curran, H. V. (2004). The acute and sub-acute effects of ‘ecstasy’ (MDMA) on processing of facial expressions: preliminary findings. Drug Alcohol Depend, 76(3), 297-304.

Kemmis, L., Hall, J. K., Kingston, R., & Morgan, M. J. (2007). Impaired fear recognition in regular recreational cocaine users. Psychopharmacology (Berl), 194(2), 151-159.

Kornreich, C., Foisy, M. L., Philippot, P., Dan, B., Tecco, J., Noel, X., et al. (2003). Impaired emotional facial expression recognition in alcoholics, opiate dependence subjects, methadone maintained subjects and mixed alcohol-opiate antecedents subjects compared with normal controls. Psychiatry Res, 119(3), 251-260.

Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A. W., Pundt, I., Sprengelmeyer, A., Calder, A. J., Berrios, G., et al. (1997). Disgust implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Proc Biol Sci, 264(1389), 1767-1773.

Townshend, J. M., & Duka, T. (2003). Mixed emotions: alcoholics’ impairments in the recognition of specific emotional facial expressions. Neuropsychologia, 41(7), 773-782.