Alcoholics lose ability to perceive emotions and danger

An interesting study found on Science Daily suggests that the cognitive effects of alcoholism (brain damage) can be measured in how well alcoholics respond to emotions and danger. From the article:

Alcoholics tend to be deficient in both cognitive and emotional processes. Previously, most brain-imaging research focused on cognition rather than emotion. A new study uses functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) to examine emotional processing, finding that alcoholics have stunted abilities to perceive dangerous situations.

"We knew that alcoholics show a deficit in accurate recognition of facial emotions," said Jasmin B. Salloum, research scientist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and corresponding author for the study. "This can lead to insensitivity to, and overestimation and/or misattribution of, certain facial expressions."

To quantify these results the research team then tried to pinpoint the precise areas where damage was most acute:

Results showed that the greatest deficit among the alcohol-dependent individuals was in brain activation during decoding of negative emotional expressions, particularly in the affective division of the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate is part of the prefrontal brain area.

"The cingulate is involved in many higher order executive functions such as focused attention, conflict resolution and decision making," said Salloum.

Egads!