Empathy, and its relationship with cognitive and emotional functions in alcohol dependency

AbstractBackground: 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 per...