Social Perception and Alcohol Use

Social perception encompasses a variety of verbal and nonverbal social information processing skills involving fronto-limbic systems that may be dysfunctional among individuals with AUD. When compared to normative samples or comparison groups, individuals with AUD have demonstrated deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER; e.g., Oscar-Berman et al., 2014). Recent meta-analyses (Bora & Zorlu, 2016; Castellano et al., 2014) have found moderate effect sizes demonstrating impairment in FER in AUD (d=.65 and .67, respectively). Additionally, large effect sizes for social perception tasks have also been observed among individuals with PTSD (Plana et al., 2014). However, the majority of the cross-sectional studies of social perception in AUD have excluded individuals with other psychiatric comorbidities such as PTSD, which is highly comorbid with AUD and may influence social perception ability in comorbid samples (Gorka et al., 2016). In this presentation, data from two GSU University Research Grant projects will be presented that further our understanding of FER in AUD and comorbid disorders