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The cerebral and cognitive consequences of alcohol dependence have been widely explored over the last few decades, but the emotional and interpersonal alterations associated with this psychiatric state have only been described quite recently. In view of the implication of these deficits in relapse after detoxification and of their omnipresence in clinical settings, there is an urgent need to further study these affective and social deficits presented by alcohol-dependent individuals. This paper aims to offer a summary of the available empirical results on this topic and to highlight the usefulness of a multidisciplinary neuroscience approach to better understand these alterations. The initial studies, focusing on emotion decoding abilities, will first be described, as they clearly established that alcohol dependence is associated with a huge deficit in the identification of the emotional content of faces. We will then show how more recent studies have capitalized on these first results to further explore affective and social abilities in alcohol dependence, leading to the current development of a new research field: the affective and social neurosciences of alcohol dependence, which combine neuroscience approaches by integrating neuro-psychological, electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. Finally, we will identify the main fundamental and clinical perspectives in this field, focusing in particular on (1) the need to take emotional and social impairments into account in the new theoretical models of addictive states and (2) the urgent need to develop neuropsychological programs specifically dedicated to the rehabilitation of these deficits.