Brain potentials to emotional pictures are modulated by alexithymia during emotion regulation

Abstract

Alexithymia is a personality trait associated with the reduced ability to regulate, identify, and communicate feelings or emotions and is often linked to psychosomatic disorders. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the relationship between individual differences in alexithymia and emotion regulation. Participants classified as scoring either high or low on the revised form of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; Taylor, Bagby, & Parker Psychother Psychosom 57:34-41, 1992) were asked to view negative and neutral images, adopting three different regulation strategies (expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, and attend) while ERPs were recorded. Results revealed an inverse relationship between TAS scores and emotion-related ERP activity during suppression, but not during reappraisal or a control "attend" condition. These results were observed in both early and late ERP latencies. These findings are interpreted according to potential differences between high-and low-TAS individuals regarding the frequency of prior utilization of suppression-based regulation strategies.

The effects of negative emotion on encoding-related neural activity predicting item and source recognition

“…If a hybrid model is true, both early and late Dm effects should be affected by emotion. These predictions are also consistent with a vast literature on ERPs to emotional stimuli in which early ERPs (approximately pre-400 ms) are often thought to reflect stimulus-driven automatic attention to emotional stimuli, whereas later ERPs (such as the "Late Positive Potential", LPP) are seen as reflecting overt attentional processes (Codispoti et al, 2007;Olofsson et al, 2008;Schupp et al, 2006;Walker et al, 2011;Watts et al, 2014). A few studies have investigated the effects of emotion on the electrophysiological Dm effects using recall tasks (Dolcos and Cabeza, 2002;Watts et al, 2014).…”

Subclinical alexithymia modulates early audio-visual perceptive and attentional event-related potentials

“…The necessity to investigate other ERP components than the P300 was also supported by the fact that, up to now, reports describing the influence of alexithymia on the P300 component have been inconsistent. While some authors have described no effect of alexithymia on P300 amplitudes (Vermeulen et al, 2008; Walker et al, 2011), others have reported distinct P300 alterations in alexithymic individuals. For example, Bermond et al (2008) found larger P300 amplitudes related to emotional stimuli in comparison to neutral stimuli, as well as for women compared to men.…”

Event-related Potentials and Their Applications

“…In addition recent data show that ERPs can be used for investigation of various personality traits such as introversion/extraversion (Bartussek et al, 1996;Guerra et al, 2001), impulsivity (Shen et al 2014), alexithymia (Franz et al, 2004;Walker et al, 2011), neuroticism (Ding et al, 2007) or antisocial personality traits (Pfabigan et al, 2012).…”