Alexithymia is associated with lower confidence in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in everyday decision-making, but emotional awareness can vary greatly between people. Alexithymia, a trait characterized by little or no awareness of one’s emotions, is broadly associated with poor mental health and increased risk of suicide. Alexithymia is fairly common, affecting as much as 10% of people in Western cultures. Understanding how alexithymia relates to decision-making may therefore have wide-reaching impacts on the quality of life for many individuals. We designed and preregistered a study that examined the relationship between alexithymia and decision-making across different task-types. Data were collected from a community sample (N = 123) and participants completed a social, an emotional, and a perceptual decision-making task, as well as a short alexithymia questionnaire. For each task, we considered multiple aspects of the decision-making process, examining participants’ accuracy, confidence, and metacognitive ability (i.e. the ability to retrospectively distinguish between correct and incorrect responses). We found no relationship between alexithymia and performance or metacognitive ability in any task. However, alexithymia was negatively correlated with confidence in both the perceptual and emotional tasks. Furthermore, confidence in one’s decision was strongly, positively correlated across task types, but both accuracy and metacognitive ability showed no relationship between tasks. These results suggest that confidence may be a trait-like, affective component of decision-making, while performance and metacognitive sensitivity appear more task-specific. Furthermore, our results challenge the current limitations of the alexithymia construct, suggesting that alexithymia may have consequences on cognitive processes beyond emotion recognition alone.