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Facial expression recognition is a central feature of emotional and social behaviour and previous studies have found that alcoholics are impaired in this skill when presented with single emotions of differing intensities. The aim of this study was to explore biases in alcoholics’ recognition of emotions when they were a mixture of two closely related emotions. The amygdala is intimately involved in encoding of emotions, especially those related to fear. In animals an increased number of withdrawals from alcohol leads to increased seizure sensitivity associated with facilitated transmission in the amygdala and related circuits. A further objective therefore was to explore the effect of previous alcohol detoxifications on the recognition of emotional facial expressions. Fourteen alcoholic inpatients were compared with 14 age and sex matched social drinking controls. They were asked to rate how much of each of six emotions …