Abstract
Neuroscience research links alexithymia, the difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and emotions, with left hemisphere dominance and/or right hemisphere deficit. To provide behavioral evidence for this neuroscientific hypothesis, we explored the relationship between alexithymia and performance in a line bisection task, a standard method for evaluating visuospatial processing in relation to right hemisphere functioning. We enrolled 222 healthy participants who completed a version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), which measures alexithymia, and were asked to mark (bisect) the center of a 10-cm horizontal segment. The results document a significant rightward shift in the center of the line in participants with borderline and manifest alexithymia compared with non-alexithymic individuals. The higher the TAS-20 score, the greater the rightward shift in the line bisection task. This finding supports the right hemisphere deficit hypothesis in alexithymia and suggests that visuospatial abnormalities may be an important component of this mental condition.
Highlights
Alexithymia is a stable personality characteristic [1,2] characterized by a disturbance of affective-emotional processing, which causes difficulties in verbally identifying and describing feelings and emotions [3]
Research in cognitive neuroscience has provided a brain basis for this affective deficit, showing that alexithymia can be characterized by left hemisphere dominance and/or right hemisphere deficit [11]
Given the close relationship between the activation level of the right fronto-parietal network, the performance in the line bisection task, and evidence of the hypoactivation of the right fronto-parietal cortex in alexithymia, we aimed to test whether this personality trait [1] predicts spatial representation in healthy individuals
Summary
Alexithymia is a stable personality characteristic [1,2] characterized by a disturbance of affective-emotional processing, which causes difficulties in verbally identifying and describing feelings and emotions [3]. Alexithymia may be associated with somatic sensations that accompany emotional arousal and may be related to somatic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus [5,6]. It is frequently associated with various psychopathological conditions such as depression [7], anxiety [8], and addiction [9], where the prevalence rate is higher than 30% [10]. Neuroimaging investigations have shown a broad network of cortical and subcortical regions, including regions that are outside the canonical circuit of emotion processing
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