Towards a Crossmodal Exploration of Cognitive Deficits in Psychopathology

Face-voice integration has been extensively explored among healthy participants during the last decades. Nevertheless, while binding alterations constitute a core feature of many psychiatric diseases and have been thoroughly investigated in schizophrenia and autism, these crossmodal processes have been little explored in other psychiatric populations, and notably in addictions. As an illustration, alcohol-dependence is associated with a wide range of psychological, cognitive and cerebral consequences, among which affective disturbances hold a crucial position. Indeed, it has been shown during the last decade that alcohol-dependent individuals present important emotional impairments, particularly in the decoding of affective faces and voices. In view of the role they play in the development and maintenance of alcohol-dependence, it appears crucial to deepen the understanding of these deficits, and notably to determine their evolution in more ecological settings. Indeed, these decoding deficits have up to now been exclusively explored in unimodal studies (i.e. focusing on one sensorial modality) while in real life situations, emotional stimulations are most often multimodal. The central objective of the present paper is thus to present recent studies using an integrative approach combining behavioural, electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to explore the audio-visual integration of emotional stimuli in alcohol-dependence. These results, clearly showing that alcohol-dependence leads to altered crossmodal processing of affective faces and voices, constitute a first step towards a multidisciplinary exploration of crossmodal processing in psychiatry, extending to other stimulations, sensorial modalities and populations. Finally, the fundamental and clinical implications of this research perspective will also be underlined.