Abstract
Alexithymia is a subclinical trait defined by difficulties in identifying and describing feelings and a cognitive style avoidant of introspection. Extensive literature shows that alexithymia is characterized by multifaceted impairments in processing emotional stimuli. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that may account for such impairments remain elusive. Here, we hypothesize that alexithymia may be understood as impairment in learning the emotional value of one’s own actions and test this comparing performance of participants with high (HA) and low (LA) levels of alexithymia on a probabilistic selection task. Results show that, compared to LA, HA need more time to learn the value of individual stimuli and associated actions as difference in reinforcement rate between stimuli decreases. In addition, HA appear less able to generalize the value of previously learned actions that lead to a negative outcome, to make adaptive choices in a new context, requiring more time to avoid the most negative stimulus between two negative stimuli. Together, the results indicate that individuals with alexithymia show impaired learning of the value of aversively motivated actions. We argue that this impairment may hinder the construction of internal representations of emotional stimuli and actions and represent a mechanism that may account for the difficulties of alexithymia in processing emotional stimuli.
Highlights
Alexithymia is a subclinical trait defined by difficulties in identifying feelings and describing them to others, and a style of thinking more focused on the concrete aspects of life rather than on introspection (Sifneos, 1973; Taylor et al, 1991)
We have previously proposed a different account of alexithymia and argued that alexithymia may be understood as impairment in effectively learning the emotional value of encountered stimuli, and showed that individuals with alexithymia have reduced psychophysiological response to aversively conditioned stimuli during Pavlovian threat conditioning, despite preserved response to unconditioned stimuli (Starita et al, 2016)
We found that only the score on the externally oriented thinking subscale made a significant contribution to the regression [R2 = 0.16, F(1,32) = 5.99, p = 0.020; EOT: β = 0.40, t(32) = 2.45, p = 0.020; difficulty in identifying feelings (DIF): p = 0.747; difficulty in describing feelings (DDF): p = 0.290]
Summary
Alexithymia is a subclinical trait defined by difficulties in identifying feelings and describing them to others, and a style of thinking more focused on the concrete aspects of life rather than on introspection (Sifneos, 1973; Taylor et al, 1991). Individuals with alexithymia represent about 10% of the general population (Taylor et al, 1991) and show multifaceted impairments in processing emotional stimuli They have impairments in the identification of emotional stimuli (Grynberg et al, 2012; Ihme et al, 2014a,b; Starita et al, 2018), the physiological response to those stimuli (Franz et al, 2003; Neumann et al, 2004; Pollatos et al, 2008; Bermond et al, 2010), the regulation of such response (Swart et al, 2009; Pollatos and Gramann, 2012) and its use to effectively guide decision making (Ferguson et al, 2009; Patil and Silani, 2014a,b; Scarpazza et al, 2017). According to this (Scarpazza and di Pellegrino, 2018), alexithymia would be characterized by a failure in emotional embodiment, as evidenced by impaired mimicry (Sonnby-Borgström, 2009; Scarpazza et al, 2018) and aberrant visual remapping of touch when viewing emotional facial expressions (Scarpazza et al, 2014, 2015)
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