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

Abstract

According to recent theories, the detection of emotions involves somatic experiences. In this study, we investigated the relation between somatic responses to affective stimuli, emotion perception, and alexithymia. Variations in automatic rapid facial reactions (RFRs) were measured in a selected population of participants with high and low levels of alexithymia (HA and LA, respectively). Electromyographic activity was recorded from the corrugator supercilii and the zygomaticus major, while participants performed a gender classification task on faces expressing various emotional states. LA participants showed congruent RFRs in response to both fearful and happy stimuli. On the other hand, HA participants did not show congruent RFRs in response to fearful faces. They showed congruent, but delayed, RFRs in response to happy faces. These results provide evidence of a deficit in somato-motor emotional processing in people with high alexithymic personality traits, and thus support the hypothesis that alexithymia is associated with a deficit in emotional embodiment.

Fear‐specific enhancement of tactile perception is disrupted after amygdala lesion

“…The lack of VRT effect (i.e., no difference between touch and no‐touch) in the presence of happy faces both in patients (with and without lesions to the amygdala) and in healthy controls is consistent with previous results (Cardini et al ., ; Scarpazza et al ., ) and could represent a by‐product of the motor resonance phenomenon. Indeed, observing emotional faces have been shown to elicit spontaneous and automatic rapid facial reactions (i.e., Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, ), usually with an onset latency in the 300–700 ms range; more specifically, when observing happy faces, a spontaneous contraction of the zygomaticus major muscle might occur (Scarpazza, Làdavas, & Cattaneo, ), therefore interfering with the detection of the electro‐tactile stimuli placed on the cheeks, delivered at 700 ms, during the present experimental task.…”

Alexithymia Is Related to the Need for More Emotional Intensity to Identify Static Fearful Facial Expressions

“…In addition, HA show impairment in embodied aspects of fearful stimuli processing. This is evidenced by reduced rapid facial mimicry in response to static fearful faces ( Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2009 ; Scarpazza et al, 2018 ), failure to show enhanced perception of tactile stimuli delivered to their face while observing a fearful – as opposed to happy or neutral – face being simultaneously touched ( Scarpazza et al, 2014 , 2015 ) and reduced skin conductance response when viewing a conditioned stimulus predictive of a shock during classical fear conditioning ( Starita et al, 2016 ). Finally, HA show impairments in processing fearful stimuli also when examining their electrophysiological responses.…”

“…It is possible that the involvement of such additional mechanisms during the identification of dynamic EFEs might have facilitated the task and led to the absence of significant differences in performance between HA and LA. Future studies should investigate this hypothesis and in particular test whether reduced facial mimicry found in HA in response to static fearful EFEs ( Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2009 ; Scarpazza et al, 2018 ) may be restored by the presentation of dynamic EFEs and be related to improvement in dynamic EFE identification. Additionally, the comparable performance in dynamic EFEs identification between HA and LA highlights the subclinical nature of alexithymia, further supporting the notion that difficulties in EFE identification of HA become evident only under specific task conditions ( Grynberg et al, 2012 ) and may not necessarily be evident in their everyday life.…”

Explicit and Implicit Responses of Seeing Own vs. Others’ Emotions: An Electromyographic Study on the Neurophysiological and Cognitive Basis of the Self-Mirroring Technique

“…In EMG studies, participants are typically presented with static pictures (e.g., Dimberg and Thunberg, 1998;Scarpazza et al, 2018) and more rarely with dynamic stimuli (Sato et al, 2008;Rymarczyk et al, 2011) and face-to-face interactions (Künecke et al, 2017). Crucially, most studies focused on two emotions, namely, anger and happiness, and rarely included other discrete emotions (see Hess and Fischer, 2013, for a review).…”