The effect of alcohol-intoxication on emotion perception and emotion perception ability: investigating possible gender differences

Alcohol-related violence is as an issue of high concern for society, where alcohol-related violence has shown to be considerably higher in males relative to females. Although a relationship between alcohol and aggression has been established, the underlying social cognitive mechanism are still not fully understood. This study sought to investigate possible gender differences in emotion recognition under the influence of an acute administration of high-dose alcohol, across a range of basic emotion types and intensity levels. Fifty-five males and fifty-five females were quasi-randomly assigned to either a placebo or alcohol-intoxication condition (BrAC mean = 0.074%, SD = .019). Emotion perception abilities were measured using the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The study found there were no gender differences in emotion recognition ability in the alcohol or placebo condition. However, there were subtle differences in the pattern of deficits within each gender, specifically females were worse at identifying fear and sadness whilst intoxicated, whereas males were worse at detecting fear, but not sadness. Overall it appears that a person's gender has little influence on social perception abilities when intoxicated, and thus may not be an underlying factor contributing to higher rates of alcohol-related violence or other negative social behaviours among males.