Abstract
Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the ability of individuals with eating disorders (EDs) to recognize facial emotion, making the clinical features of this population hard to determine. This study tested the hypothesis that where observed, emotion recognition deficits exhibited by patients with EDs are due to alexithymia, a co-occurring condition also associated with emotion recognition difficulties. Ability to recognize facial emotion was investigated in a sample of individuals with EDs and varying degrees of co-occurring alexithymia, and an alexithymia-matched control group. Alexithymia, but not ED symptomology, was predictive of individuals' emotion recognition ability, inferred from tolerance to high-frequency visual noise. This relationship was specific to emotion recognition, as neither alexithymia nor ED symptomology was associated with ability to recognize facial identity. These findings suggest that emotion recognition difficulties exhibited by patients with ED are attributable to alexithymia, and may not be a feature of EDs per se.
Highlights
Feeding and eating disorders are axis I disorders characterized by disturbed and inappropriate patterns of eating [1]
There was no difference between the groups in ability to recognize any of the seven individual emotions and no correlation between eating disorder examination questionnaire (EDE-Q) score and either emotion or identity recognition thresholds. These results suggest that eating disorders (EDs) symptomology is unrelated to emotion and identity recognition ability, whereas alexithymia explains substantial variation in participants’ ability to recognize facial emotion
Alexithymia, not ED symptomology, was found to predict emotion recognition ability; severe alexithymia was associated with impaired emotion recognition, whereas ED diagnosis was unrelated to emotion recognition thresholds
Summary
Feeding and eating disorders (hereafter EDs) are axis I disorders characterized by disturbed and inappropriate patterns of eating [1]. Several authors have reported deficits of facial emotion recognition in individuals with AN and BN [4,5,6,7] and in non-clinical samples of women with high levels of ED symptomology [8,9]. This evidence is contested, with several studies finding no evidence for impaired recognition of facial emotion in ED samples [10,11,12]. The overall group difference fell short of significance in a meta-regression [13]
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