Abstract
BackgroundAlexithymia, a condition characterized by deficits in interpreting and regulating feelings, is a risk factor for a variety of psychiatric conditions. Little is known about how alexithymia influences the processing of emotions in music and speech. Appreciation of such emotional qualities in auditory material is fundamental to human experience and has profound consequences for functioning in daily life. We investigated the neural signature of such emotional processing in alexithymia by means of event-related potentials.MethodologyAffective music and speech prosody were presented as targets following affectively congruent or incongruent visual word primes in two conditions. In two further conditions, affective music and speech prosody served as primes and visually presented words with affective connotations were presented as targets. Thirty-two participants (16 male) judged the affective valence of the targets. We tested the influence of alexithymia on cross-modal affective priming and on N400 amplitudes, indicative of individual sensitivity to an affective mismatch between words, prosody, and music. Our results indicate that the affective priming effect for prosody targets tended to be reduced with increasing scores on alexithymia, while no behavioral differences were observed for music and word targets. At the electrophysiological level, alexithymia was associated with significantly smaller N400 amplitudes in response to affectively incongruent music and speech targets, but not to incongruent word targets.ConclusionsOur results suggest a reduced sensitivity for the emotional qualities of speech and music in alexithymia during affective categorization. This deficit becomes evident primarily in situations in which a verbalization of emotional information is required.
Highlights
Alexithymia has been recognized as a major risk factor for a variety of psychopathological and medical conditions, including chronic pain, somatization, depression, and anxiety [1]
Our results suggest a reduced sensitivity for the emotional qualities of speech and music in alexithymia during affective categorization
We investigated the neural signature of automatic affective priming of words, speech prosody, and music as a function of alexithymia by means of event-related potentials (ERPs)
Summary
Alexithymia (literally translated ‘‘no words for feelings’’) has been recognized as a major risk factor for a variety of psychopathological and medical conditions, including chronic pain, somatization, depression, and anxiety [1]. Neuroimaging studies have provided additional evidence for an association of alexithymia with differences in brain activation for a variety of tasks that involve emotional processing, such as the processing of emotional pictures [7] and the processing of facial expressions of emotion [8], the imagery of autobiographical emotional events [9], the observation of fearful body expressions [10], and during empathy for pain [11] Since such impairment during the conscious processing of emotional information may be dependent upon dysfunctions at earlier processing stages, the investigation of automatic sensitivity to affective stimuli is of great importance to understanding the emotion processing deficits individuals with alexithymia exhibit. We investigated the neural signature of such emotional processing in alexithymia by means of event-related potentials
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