Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions in Alexithymia

Abstract

Alexithymia is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in identifying and verbalizing emotions. Previous studies have shown a significant association between alexithymia and a lack of ability to decode emotional facial expressions. Three groups of university students (N = 1645) were formed by splitting the sample based on Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) scores. All participants performed an emotional expression recognition task, using the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes'' method. The experimenter presented images of the eye-region of the faces of actors and actresses. As expected, results showed that alexithymics performed worse on ability to infer others' emotiona l sta tes expressed by the eyes. These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired emotion recognition, that is most apparent when processing capacity is restricted, high-alexithymic individuals could develop less detailed perceptual representations of facial expression which might impair the process of drawing conclusions about its emotional significance.

The role of alexithymia in social cognition: Evidence from a non-clinical population

“…The available evidence highlights contrasting results regarding the presence of difficulties in the recognition of others' affective mental states in individuals with alexithymia. Indeed, although some previous studies found significant relationships between alexithymia and impairments in RMET performance (Gökçen et al, 2016;Martinez-Sanchez et al, 2017;Oakley et al, 2016;Swart et al, 2009), others found mixed results (Demers and Koven, 2015). In particular, the study of Demers and Koven (2015) found that only the EOT factor of the TAS-20 significantly predicted impaired performance on the RMET.…”

Facial Emotion Recognition in Obesity and in Fibromyalgia: A Systematic Review

“…Alexithymia, reported in both fibromyalgia [23,36,38,76,87,103,104] and obesity [20,22,[32][33][34][35], may be described not only as a marker of global emotional difficulties [105], but also as a general failure of interoception (i.e., the ability in perceiving and recognizing the internal state of the body [20,[106][107][108]). In other words, because of the presence of alexithymia, individuals might misattribute the origin of their bodily experience [38] and/or showed difficulties in converting own somatic sensations in feelings and cognitions [106]; this difficulty may in turn interfere also with the ability to identify others' emotional states [76,[109][110][111][112][113][114], with effect on the emotional contagion and empathy (as preliminary observed in fibromyalgia [23,115] and obesity [116]).…”

The Mediating Role of Defensive Mechanisms in the Relationship between Social Phobia and Alexithymia in University Students

“…Because these individuals cannot properly identify their negative emotions, they have difficulties in depleting and neutralizing these emotions. The lack of emotion regulation ability intensifies the negative disabling emotions [33]. The more deficiency in identifying and differentiating the emotions, the more severe the symptoms of phobia and depression.…”