Abstract
Non-organic vision loss (NOVL), a functional partial or global vision loss, might be considered a manifestation of conversion disorder. The few previous studies focused on investigating the relationship between cerebral activity and subjective symptoms in NOVL; however, the emotional processing is still neglected. In the present case-controls study, we investigated the capability of two individuals diagnosed with NOVL to recognize implicitly the emotions of fear and anger; this was assessed through a facial emotion recognition task based on the redundant target effect. In addition, the level of alexithymia was measured by asking them to judge explicitly their ability to identify and describe emotions. Both individuals showed selective difficulties in recognizing the emotion of fear when their performance was contrasted with a matched control sample; they also mislabeled other emotional stimuli, judging them as fearful, when they were not. However, they did not report alexithymia when measured using a standard questionnaire. This preliminary investigation reports a mismatch between the implicit (i.e., the behavior in the experimental paradigm) and the explicit (i.e., the subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional capability) components of the emotional processing in NOVL. Moreover, fear seems to represent a critical emotion in this condition, as has been reported in other psychiatric disorders. However, possible difficulties in the emotional processing of fear would emerge only when they are inferred from an implicit behavior, instead of a subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional processing capability.
Highlights
Non-organic vision loss (NOVL) is a functional partial or global vision loss in which an organic disease or a pathology in the visual system does not explain a subjective visual disturbance (Beatty, 1999; Stone et al, 2005; Bruce and Newman, 2010)
Few studies investigating NOVL have been reported in the literature: they focused on the relationship between cerebral activity and subjective symptoms (Werring et al, 2004; Schoenfeld et al, 2011) in affected individuals, while an extensive investigation of the psychological and emotional components has been lacking
We provide for the first time in the literature, to current knowledge, an investigation of the implicit and explicit components of the emotional processing in two individuals affected by NOVL
Summary
Non-organic vision loss (NOVL) is a functional partial or global vision loss in which an organic disease or a pathology in the visual system does not explain a subjective visual disturbance (Beatty, 1999; Stone et al, 2005; Bruce and Newman, 2010). We provide for the first time in the literature, to current knowledge, an investigation of the implicit and explicit components of the emotional processing in two individuals affected by NOVL To study their capability to implicitly recognize emotions expressed by others, we adopted a facial emotion recognition task based on the “redundant target effect” (Miniussi et al, 1998), according to which people respond faster when two identical targets are presented simultaneously rather than when presented alone. Following the previous results reported in the literature about aberrant cerebral activity in NOVL (Werring et al, 2004; Schoenfeld et al, 2011), we studied the individuals’ capability to recognize neutral visual stimuli (i.e., geometrical shapes)
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