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Background: Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand the other's thoughts and feelings. It contains both cognitive and emotional components., Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the empathy ability of patients with alcohol dependency in association with cognitive and emotional functions, after acute detoxification and during long-term abstinence., Methods: Thirty-three alcohol dependent inpatients that completed a detoxification process and stayed abstinent throughout the study, and 33 healthy comparison subjects that matched the patients for age, gender, and education level were included in the study. All the participants were administered the Facial Emotion Identification Test (FEIT), Facial Emotion Discrimination Test (FEDT), Trail Making Test (TMT), Digit Span Test (DST), Auditory Consonant Trigram Test (ACT), and Empathy Quotient Scale (EQS). All the tests were repeated after 3 months of abstinence., Results: At the first evaluation conducted after detoxification, patients performed significantly worse than healthy comparisons in almost all tests. At the second evaluation, which was conducted after 3 months of abstinence, the patients improved significantly in all measures, and no significant differences were detected between the patient and comparison groups. There were significant correlations between the test scores and EQS score., Conclusions: Alcohol dependency has deleterious effects on empathy ability, and cognitive and emotional functions. Those impairments can improve with abstinence. Empathy ability has strong relationships with cognitive and emotional functions.

Objective: Decision-making processes have become a principal target of study among addiction researchers. However, studies are often hampered by two significant methodological challenges: multi-substance dependence and comorbid conditions, which are independently associated with neurocognitive impairments. The purpose of this study was to compare alcohol dependent subjects without any comorbidity, with controls on a measure of decision-making and executive functions and to examine the interrelationship among these measures. Methods: We compared 30 alcohol-dependent (AD) male patients with 30 matched male healthy controls regarding their performances on the Iowa Gambling Task, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Test, Auditory Consonant Trigram Test and the Category Naming Test. Results: The AD group was not significantly more impaired compared to controls on any test. Only working memory scores were associated with decision-making scores in the total group. Conclusion: The results suggest that our sample of pure AD do not have global deficits in decision-making as measured by the IGT and that their poor decisions regarding their alcohol consumption are limited to drinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]