Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia

Abstract

Emotional difficulties in alexithymia and their social consequences have been linked to alterations in autonomic nervous system. However, most of previous studies did not take into account the distinction between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of the alexithymia, leading to inconsistent results.Aim: In this study, we compared the effects of both dimensions of alexithymia on the autonomic arousal to emotional and social visual stimulations.Methods: Skin conductance responses (SCRs) to items of the International Affective Pictures System characterized by emotional (unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant), social (with humans) or non-social (without humans) content were recorded in non-alexithymic (NA), affective (AA) and cognitive alexithymic (CA) participants, selected on the basis of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire. All participants responded to questionnaires of empathy, social phobia, depression, and anxiety before the experiment and evaluated the arousal of the pictures after it.Results: Cognitive alexithymic group showed lower amplitudes of SCRs to pictures with social than without social relevance whereas the opposite pattern was observed for the NA group. Arousal emotional effects of the pictures on SCRs did not differ among groups. In addition, CA participants showed lower scores than NA in the Personal Taking sub-scale of the empathy questionnaire, while AA showed lower scores than NA in the fantasy sub-scale. The CA group showed higher social phobia, depression and anxiety scores, than the other two groups.Conclusion: This work has two original outcomes: first, affective alexithymics expressed lower empathic affective scores than other groups; second, alexithymia modulated the impact of the social relevance of the stimuli on the autonomic reactivity, this impact vanishing in affective alexithymics and reversing in cognitive alexithymics. Thus, though the groups could not be distinguished on the basis of emotional effect on SCRs, they clearly differed when the empathic characteristics and the autonomic impact of social relevance were considered. Finally, the described autonomic signature to social relevant information could contribute to elucidate the difficulty of alexithymics to deal with emotions during social transactions.

Invisible side of emotions: somato-motor responses to affective facial displays in alexithymia

“…The data on explicit emotion recognition are in line with those of the previous studies on alexithymia and recognition of emotional faces or scenes (Kano et al 2003;Meriau et al 2006;Pollatos et al 2008, Heinzel et al 2010Lee et al 2011;Pollatos and Grahaman 2011;Scarpazza et al 2014Scarpazza et al , 2015Martinez-Velazques et al 2017;see;Grynberg et al 2012 for a review), where HA participants were consistently found to have normal explicit emotion recognition capabilities. Alexithymia is associated with poor explicit emotion recognition only when stimuli are presented under temporal constraints (Ihme et al 2014;Parker et al 2005) or when the emotion is expressed at a low intensity (Starita et al in revision;Swart et al 2009).…”

“…A previous study suggested that a person's empathic ability predicts the degree to which that person produces RFRs in response to others' emotional expressions (Hussey and Safford 2009). Both our group (Scarpazza et al 2014) and other groups (for instance: Moriguchi et al 2007;Martinez-Velazques et al 2017;Sonnby-Borgstrom 2009) have previously demonstrated reduced empathic abilities in HA participants relative to LA participants using the IRI. The new aspect of the present study is the correlation between somato-motor embodiment of emotions (measured by RFR magnitude) and empathic ability (measured by the IRI perspective taking score).…”

The Influence of Empathy Trait and Gender on Empathic Responses. A Study With Dynamic Emotional Stimulus and Eye Movement Recordings

“…As indicated, we also observed that participants of LE group exhibited a high score in alexithymia, a difficulty to identify, analyze, and express emotional experiences (Sifneos, 1973;van der Velde et al, 2013) widely related to deficits in social skills (Goerlich et al, 2012;Martínez-Velázquez et al, 2017). In fact, the observed negative association between empathy trait and alexithymia levels fits well with observations reported in previous studies (Fossati et al, 2009;Moral and Ramos-Basurto, 2015).…”

“…Considering that previous research has linked alexithymia trait with empathy trait (Moral and Ramos-Basurto, 2015;Martínez-Velázquez et al, 2017), the alexithymia trait was assessed by using Spanish version (Moral, 2008) of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale . This version has shown good reliability (α = 0.82) and stability indices in the Latin American population.…”

“…Overall, further studies are clearly needed to disentangle empathic responses to emotional dynamic stimuli. Perhaps, the association of empathy test with physiological measures, especially those related with emotional activation (Martínez-Velázquez et al, 2017), could originate more heuristic results.…”