Abstract
BackgroundAlexithymia, or “no words for feelings”, is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in emotion recognition and regulation. It is unknown whether this deficit is due primarily to regulation, perception, or mentalizing of emotions. In order to shed light on the core deficit, we tested our subjects on a wide range of emotional tasks. We expected the high alexithymics to underperform on all tasks.MethodTwo groups of healthy individuals, high and low scoring on the cognitive component of the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire, completed questionnaires of emotion regulation and performed several emotion processing tasks including a micro expression recognition task, recognition of emotional prosody and semantics in spoken sentences, an emotional and identity learning task and a conflicting beliefs and emotions task (emotional mentalizing).ResultsThe two groups differed on the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire and Empathy Quotient. Specifically, the Emotion Regulation Quotient showed that alexithymic individuals used more suppressive and less reappraisal strategies. On the behavioral tasks, as expected, alexithymics performed worse on recognition of micro expressions and emotional mentalizing. Surprisingly, groups did not differ on tasks of emotional semantics and prosody and associative emotional-learning.ConclusionIndividuals scoring high on the cognitive component of alexithymia are more prone to suppressive emotion regulation strategies rather than reappraisal strategies. Regarding emotional information processing, alexithymia is associated with reduced performance on measures of early processing as well as higher order mentalizing. However, difficulties in the processing of emotional language were not a core deficit in our alexithymic group.
Highlights
Alexithymia, or ‘‘no words for feelings’’, is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation, difficulties in identifying, describing and communicating feelings, difficulties in differentiating feelings from bodily sensations and diminished affect-related fantasy [1,2]
The two groups differed on the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire and Empathy Quotient
The Emotion Regulation Quotient showed that alexithymic individuals used more suppressive and less reappraisal strategies
Summary
Alexithymia, or ‘‘no words for feelings’’, is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation, difficulties in identifying, describing and communicating feelings, difficulties in differentiating feelings from bodily sensations and diminished affect-related fantasy [1,2]. On a basic emotional-perceptual level of processing, Suslow [10] found that the ‘difficulty describing feelings’ score on the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS20) [13] was correlated to a facilitation effect in a priming paradigm for negative words, consistent with an enhanced automatic processing of affective information. Contradictory to these results, Vermeulen et al [11] showed that individuals with high scores on alexithymia are less prone to process emotional information at an automatic level, as was investigated in a different priming paradigm, in which negative and positive primes We expected the high alexithymics to underperform on all tasks
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