Abstract
Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by deficits in processing emotional stimuli. However, little is known about the processing of odours in alexithymia, even though there is extensive proof that emotion and olfaction are closely linked. The present study is aimed at investigating how alexithymic individuals process emotions conveyed by odors. Emotional responses to unpleasant, neutral odors and clean air were collected through self-report ratings and psychophysiological measures in a sample of 62 healthy participants with high (HA), medium (MA) and low (LA) levels of alexithymia. Moreover, participants performed tests on odors identification and threshold and completed questionnaires assessing olfactory imagery and awareness. Two main results have been found: first, HA and MA groups showed altered physiological responses to odors, compared to LA, while no differences among the groups were observed in odor ratings; and second, affective and cognitive alexithymia components were differently associated with the performance on olfactory tests, skin conductance response to odors, reaction times in the rating task, and scores on olfactory questionnaires. We conclude that alexithymia is characterized by altered physiological reactions to olfactory stimuli; moreover, we stress the importance of evaluating the different alexithymia components since they affect emotional stimuli processing in different ways.
Highlights
Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by deficits in processing emotional stimuli
The Linear Mixed-effects models (LMMs) model including the interaction group*odor factors showed no significant differences between groups and no significant interactions
In the present study we examined the differences between high alexithymia (HA), medium level of alexithymia (MA) and low alexithymia (LA) individuals in processing emotional olfactory stimuli
Summary
Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by deficits in processing emotional stimuli. Neutral odors and clean air were collected through self-report ratings and psychophysiological measures in a sample of 62 healthy participants with high (HA), medium (MA) and low (LA) levels of alexithymia. Several studies have revealed that even in healthy participants, alexithymia is characterized by deficits in the processing of emotional stimuli at the behavioral, physiological and neurobiological levels (see[11] for a recent review). Alexithymic individuals have been characterized as presenting less physiological reactivity: for instance, they showed smaller electrodermal responses or lower increase in heart rate when presented with emotion-provoking slides[16,17] or negative images[18,19]. Participants with high alexithymia scores show significantly smaller N400 amplitudes in response to affectively incongruent music and speech targets[28] and larger N100 amplitudes in response to emotional prosodies[27,29]
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