The event-related potentials study on attentional deployment in alexithymia

Abstract

Objective To study the attentional deployment strategy of emotion regulation and its processing mechanisms in alexithymia. Methods 21 alexithymia subjects and 22 normal subjects completed attentional deployment task.The reaction time(RT) and accuracy were recorded automatically and the event-related potentials(ERPs) were recorded by neuroscan system. Results ①From the behavioral results, the differences of RT and accuracy to neutral pictures((1840.17±204.44)ms vs (1845.17±252.97)ms; (0.859±0.073) vs (0.884±0.068)) and negative pictures ((1888.94±200.09)ms vs(1890.38±263.72)ms); (0.845±0.088) vs (0.845±0.091))in calculation task between two groups were not statistically significant(all P>0.05). The differences of RT and accuracy in emotion task were not statistically significant(P>0.05). ②In RT and accuracy, the task main effects were statistically significant(F(1, 42)=637.40, P 0.05). P3 amplitude induced by negative pictures were significantly greater than those induced by neutral pictures in emotion task((–0.138±0.463)μV vs (0.789±0.541)μV). Conclusion The attentional deployment can effectively regulate the negative pictures processing and occur in the late stage of the picture processing. No attentional deployment defects in alexithymia. Key words: Alexithymia; Emotion regulation; Attentional deployment; Event-related potentials