Emotion Recognition Deficits In Heroin Abstainers

Drug addiction is a serious social problem.Long-term substance abuse can affect emotional perception,thus affecting interpersonal and social cognitive functions.Heroin is currently a widely used drug in China.Early studies have found that heroin addicts and abstainers show defects and biases different from normal people when identifying emotional faces.They are characterized by lower accuracy and longer response time in identifying emotions,especially for negative effects.However,the cross-modal(audio-visual)processing of emotional stimuli,which occurs most frequently in everyday life,has not yet been explored.Automatic processing of cross-modal emotional information may be beneficial to emotional recognition performance.Therefore,The purpose of this study is to explore the crossmodal processing,specifically the auditory-visual facilitation effect,and emotion recognition bias of heroin abstainers in cross-modal emotion recognition through two emotion recognition experiments.In experiment 1,we recruited 32 male heroin abstainers as the abstainer group and 30 male participants who were never addicted to any drug as the control group.The male heroin abstainers were recruited from a compulsory isolation detoxification,the control group participants were volunteers.The current study used an audiovisual emotional categorization tasks.In this task,faces and voices are congruent(eg,happy faces-happy voices)or incongruent(eg,happy faces-angry voices),and participants need to pay attention only to emotional faces and ignore emotional voices.Participants were asked to indicate,by pressing one of two keys,whether the face was happy or angry.Results showed that the reaction time of the congruent condition was significantly shorter than incongruent conditions in heroin abstainers,and the difference in reaction time between incongruent and congruent condition of heroin abstainers was lower than the control group.In experiment 2,we recruited 32 male heroin abstainers as the abstainer group and 30 male participants who were never addicted to any drug as the control group,aimed to exam the cross-modal integration effect and emotional recognition bias of heroin abstainers on different emotion types.Whether the emotional consistency promotion effect is emotionally specific.Participants need to complete the emotion recognition tasks of three modals(visual,auditory,and audiovisual congruence).The results found that the heroin abstinence was significantly higher in the three modals of anger,disgust,and fear than in the unimodal.The audio-visual performance of anger and fear was comparable to the control group,and the audio-visual accuracy of disgust was significantly lower than control group.In the control group,however,there was no audiovisual consistency promotion effect in the control group.The percentage of misidentification of auditory modal in the abstinence group was significantly higher than the control group,and the percentage of misidentification of bimodal was significantly higher than the unimodal.Therefore,we can draw the following conclusions.Heroin abstainers have a cross-modal consistent promotion effect,which is reflected in the response of congruent emotional information faster than incongruent,anger,disgust,and fear have a dual-channel consistent promotion effect;heroin abstainers have a part of their emotional cross-modal integration ability.The damage is specifically manifested in the absence of integration effects in some emotions,and the consistent promotion effect is less than that in normal people;heroin abstainers have more confusion between emotions than unimodal when performing cross-modal integration of emotions,and more confusion on the unimodal than normal people.Cross-modal processing of complex social stimuli(such as faces and voices)is crucial for interpersonal relations.The social integration of heroin abstainers is crucial.This study provides evidence for a preserved but deficit cross-modal integration of emotional signals in heroin abstainers,which not only making a further understanding of the emotion perception of heroin abstainers,but also providing guidance for future clinical interventions to heroin abstainers.