Abstract
Alexithymia—reflecting deficits in cognitive emotion processing—is highly prevalent in individuals with depressive disorders. Subsequently, mixed evidence for attentional bias is found in these individuals. Alexithymia may be a potential influencing factor for attentional bias in depression. In the current study, 83 currently depressed (CD) and 76 never-depressed (ND) controls completed an eye-tracker task consisting of valenced (non)-social pictures. Alexithymia scores were also included as a moderator as both a continuous and categorical measure (so high vs. low alexithymia). No group difference or moderating effect of alexithymia was found on attentional bias. Thus, alexithymic symptoms, included both dimensionally and categorically, may not influence biased attentional processing in depression compared to ND individuals. Thus, it is important to explore other potential explaining factors for the equivocal results found on biased attentional processing of emotional information in depression.
Highlights
Alexithymia reflects a deficit in the cognitive processing of emotions [1]
Because the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the group comparison including the alexithymia subdivision includes zero, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no group differences
Because the 95% CI of the interaction effect of Group∗TAS-20 score includes zero, see Table 4, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no group differences
Summary
Alexithymia reflects a deficit in the cognitive processing of emotions [1]. Alexithymia has two components. 8–13% of persons show alexithymic traits [4,5,6] These traits are more prevalent across a wide range of somatic and psychiatric disorders [7,8,9,10] and are high (26–50%) among patients with depressive disorders [9, 11]. Deficits in identifying and recognizing emotional feelings due to co-occurring alexithymia could lead to misinterpretation of depressive symptoms as symptoms of a somatic disorder. It could result in depressive symptoms staying undetected and, possibly develop into more severe or chronic depressive symptoms [13]. This increase of depressive symptoms that may be due to comorbid alexithymia underscores the Alexithymia and Attentional Bias in Depression need to investigate possible factors that could play a role in the strong relation between alexithymic symptoms and depression
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