Alexithymia disrupts the beneficial influence of arousal on attention: Evidence from the attentional blink.

Abstract

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct that encompasses difficulties in identifying and describing feelings along with an externally oriented cognitive style. The influence of alexithymia and arousal on the cognitive processing of emotion is now widely demonstrated. To test the joint influence of alexithymia and arousal on attentional processes, 55 participants completed 2 blocks of attentional blink trials, one after a baseline (relaxed) session and the other after a cycling (aroused) session. The attentional blink task consists in presenting a neutral first to-be-detected target and second targets (T2) that were neutral (e.g., echo), low-arousal (i.e., emptiness), or high-arousal (e.g., murder) words and presented 213 ms after the first target. The results show that alexithymia interacted with arousal (cycling vs. baseline) and type T2, so that arousal was beneficial to detect T2 only for low-alexithymia scorers. The findings are discussed within the framework showing a decoupling between physiological arousal and subjective experience in high-alexithymia scorers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).