Alcoholic men can't feel your pain. Here's why

http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/08/15029060-alcoholic-men-cant-feel-your-pain-heres-why?lite

By Linda Carroll
Nov. 8, 2012

Too much alcohol can ruin a man’s appreciation of irony and block feelings of empathy. And that’s true even when he’s sober, a new study suggests.

Scientists suspect that chronic heavy drinking damages parts of the brain that are crucial to decoding others’ emotions and to processing humor, especially irony.

“Chronic alcohol abuse seems to have effects on the perception and decoding of emotional expressions,” says Simona Amenta, a post-doctoral researcher at Italy’s University of Milano-Bicocca and a lecturer at the Catholic University of Milan. “It has been associated with … deficits in emotion recognition and verbalization, leading to difficulties in distinguishing and comprehending people’s emotional states.”
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Some studies, in fact, have shown that alcoholics tend to misidentify the emotions of people they are interacting with, Amenta notes. So sadness can be mistaken for anger, while happiness might come across as a negative emotion.

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Lara Ray, an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, isn’t surprised to see differences in how alcoholic and non-alcoholic brains work. Chronic alcohol abuse changes the brain, she says.

The kinds of misinterpretations alcoholics make might predispose them to getting into the fights that seem all too common in bars.

That, plus the fact that alcohol is a disinhibitor. “So those who are higher in aggression become more aggressive,” Ray adds.