How Alcohol Affects Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal behavior can be influenced by many different factors, and I’m currently interested on how alcohol affects how people communicate nonverbally. I read that alcohol can cause “…decoding accuracy [to be] impaired, especially men’s ability to identify anger, disgust, and contempt” (Knapp, Hall and Horgan, 2013). This started me thinking about different ways alcohol could affect nonverbal communication, and in turn, how that could affect interpersonal relationships. My uncle is an alcoholic and it affects his family. His wife (my aunt) and his children (my cousins) are around him more than I am, so if I notice it then they must be affected by it every day. I was interested in learning more about how alcohol can affect his relationships in regard to nonverbal communication.
Borrill, Rosen, and Summerfield (1987) conducted a study testing the ability to judge facial expression and emotion. The intoxicated participants were less accurate in their evaluations than the sober participants, as hypothesized. It was found that “alcohol was associated with greater impairment of judgments of anger than of other emotions” (Borrill, Rosen, and Summerfield, 1987). The specific discover of the propensity to misjudge the anger emotion correlates with observations in my family. I’ve been in conversations with my parents and my aunt, and these findings support some of the problems she has with my uncle. She has said that he does not even recognize that she is upset with him a lot of the time. She can be angry or hurt, and try to communicate that, but unless she is very clear about her feelings verbally, he usually will not pick up on