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Abstract

Adult eating disorder patients have been characterised by alexithymia. We investigated whether adolescent eating disorder patients also show deficits in emotional functioning. To measure emotional functioning a questionnaire (the TAS) and an emotion recognition test were administered to 30 eating disorder (ED) adolescent girls and 31 healthy controls (HC), matched for age, education, and social status. Non-emotional, cognitive parallel tasks were administered on the same occasion to find out whether a possible deficit was emotion-specific or of a more general cognitive nature. The ED patients scored higher on the TAS and performed worse on the emotion recognition test, but no differences between the groups were found on the non-emotional cognitive instruments. It was concluded that adolescent eating disorder patients, just like adult eating disorder patients, are characterised by alexithymia and show specific deficits in emotional functioning. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Electroencephalography in eating disorders

“…43,44 Brain signals related to the perception of emotional faces are usually studied by means of ERP. With regard to eating disorders, components like N200 (N200 or N2 is a negative-going wave that peaks 200–350 ms poststimulus) and P300 mostly used 45.…”

Alexithymia and eating disorders: a critical review of the literature

“…See Table 1 for a summary of the studies. Across studies, significantly more eating disorder patients are categorized as alexithymic compared to healthy community controls [4,5,8,23-34]. When examining alexithymia as a continuous measure, studies have shown that individuals with eating disorders have higher total alexithymia scores as well as higher scores on two out of three factors: 1) Difficulties identifying feelings and differentiating between feelings and bodily sensations, and 2) Difficulties describing feelings [2,4,5,24-28,30-43].…”

“…For instance, Berthoz and colleagues [57] found significant relations between self-reported TAS-20 scores and scores on the Observer Alexithymia Scale completed by a selected family member in a sample of 75 females with a diagnosis of an eating disorder. Using a skills-based approach, Zonnevijlle-Bender and colleagues [34] found that females between the ages of 12 and 18 years who met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AN self-reported significantly higher scores on the TAS-20 compared to controls, and also performed significantly worse on an emotion recognition task that required them to label pictures of emotional facial expressions. In a later study, Zonnevijlle-Bender and colleagues [78] identified a similar pattern of results in adult females with AN.…”

Interoception and Autonomic Correlates during Social Interactions. Implications for Anorexia

“…In the last years, thanks to the support of neuroscience, several neurobiological models of eating disorders emerged; Kaye et al (2009, 2010, 2013, 2015) for example, consider AN as the product of an altered serotonin and dopamine metabolism which in turn may leads to dysfunctional neural process involved in emotion and appetite. Such alterations would contribute to AN trait-related vulnerabilities like anxiety, emotional recognition and regulation deficits (Schmidt et al, 1993; Zonnevijlle-Bendek et al, 2002; Kucharska-Pietura et al, 2004; Schmidt and Treasure, 2006; Harrison et al, 2009; Rowsell et al, 2016), insensitivity to reward (Kaye et al, 2009; Harrison et al, 2010), disturbed perception of physical states (Fassino et al, 2004; Pollatos et al, 2008; see below) and cognitive inflexibility and rigidity (Katzman et al, 2001; Anderluh et al, 2003; Kucharska-Pietura et al, 2004; Tchanturia et al, 2004; Cassin and von Ranson, 2005; Chui et al, 2008; Titova et al, 2013) that may be exacerbated by puberty and social desirability, given rise to the onset of AN.…”