Explicit and Implicit Components of the Emotional Processing in Non-organic Vision Loss: Behavioral Evidence About the Role of Fear in Functional Blindness

Abstract

Non-organic vision loss (NOVL), a functional partial or global vision loss, might be considered a manifestation of conversion disorder. The few previous studies focused on investigating the relationship between cerebral activity and subjective symptoms in NOVL; however, the emotional processing is still neglected. In the present case-controls study, we investigated the capability of two individuals diagnosed with NOVL to recognize implicitly the emotions of fear and anger; this was assessed through a facial emotion recognition task based on the redundant target effect. In addition, the level of alexithymia was measured by asking them to judge explicitly their ability to identify and describe emotions. Both individuals showed selective difficulties in recognizing the emotion of fear when their performance was contrasted with a matched control sample; they also mislabeled other emotional stimuli, judging them as fearful, when they were not. However, they did not report alexithymia when measured using a standard questionnaire. This preliminary investigation reports a mismatch between the implicit (i.e., the behavior in the experimental paradigm) and the explicit (i.e., the subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional capability) components of the emotional processing in NOVL. Moreover, fear seems to represent a critical emotion in this condition, as has been reported in other psychiatric disorders. However, possible difficulties in the emotional processing of fear would emerge only when they are inferred from an implicit behavior, instead of a subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional processing capability.

Detection and Recognition of Fearful Facial Expressions During the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic in an Italian Sample: An Online Experiment

“…A short version of the implicit facial emotion recognition task (Scarpina et al, 2018) focused on the emotion of fear was used. It was a go-no go task.…”

“…For both the RT and the level of Accuracy, an independent sample t-test was performed independently for each experimental condition between the performance registered in this experiment and the performance reported in Scarpina et al (2018), in which 25 healthy subjects (16 women, age M = 42 years; SD = 14; range 23-61; education M = 15; SD = 2; range: 8-18) were tested with a long extended version of the task. Specifically, this previous version consisted of overall 384 trials (32 valid trials and 16 catch trials for each experimental condition; each condition was tested twice).…”

“…Online surveys were generally used, as described in the recent works by Moccia et al (2020) in the Italian context. This approach may offer the advantages of faster data collection, larger samples, and reductions in costs when compared with the most traditional sample collection methodologies (post, or phone); questionnaires allow collecting the subjective and explicit description of own psychological behavior (Scarpina et al, 2018). However, as in my knowledge, no previous study has proposed an online behavioral task to explore the psychological functioning in the case of social distancing.…”

“…However, as in my knowledge, no previous study has proposed an online behavioral task to explore the psychological functioning in the case of social distancing. Therefore, in the present study I described the application of an online version of an implicit facial emotion recognition task focused on the emotion of fear (Scarpina et al, 2018) on an Italian sample during the COVID-19 epidemic lockdown. This task allowed registering the individuals' behavior when they were exposed to fearful expressions.…”

“…The implicit facial emotion recognition task (Scarpina et al, 2018) allows quantifying the participants' behavior; in other words, it might allow providing an experimental answer to the FIGURE 1 | Schematic representation of the attentional mechanism of the redundant target effect. For each experimental condition, an example of the visual stimulus was shown.…”