Seeing mixed emotions: Alexithymia, emotion perception bias, and quality in dyadic interactions

Abstract

Alexithymia, the difficulty in identifying and describing emotions, has been found to contribute to problems in dyadic interactions and relationships. We studied the association between alexithymic tendencies, emotion perception biases and the quality of naturally occurring dyadic interactions. Participants completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS), the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions, a laboratory task that assesses accuracy and bias (perceiving emotions additional to those communicated) in emotion perception, and the Faces part of the Mayer Salovey and Caruso Emotional intelligence Test followed by a 10-day event sampling study of the quality of their naturally occurring social interactions. The Difficulties in Identifying Feelings (DIF) subscale of the TAS was negatively related to all indices of quality of social interaction. DIF was positively and moderately strongly correlated with bias in emotion perception, and importantly, bias in emotion perception in the ACE-faces task mediated DIF effects on social interaction outcomes. Perceiving emotions additional to those communicated as measured in the ACE task is an important aspect of alexithymic tendencies and their effects on dyadic interactions.