Impaired Verbal and Nonverbal Emotion Recognition in Alexithymia

Abstract

Although clinical observations suggest that alexithymic individuals have a deficit in their ability to recognize emotional stimuli and that this deficit is not simply due to a problem in verbal labeling, these two hypotheses have not been empirically confirmed. Three hundred eighty participants in a community survey without current or past histories of psychiatric disorder completed two independent measures of alexithymia [the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20)] and the Perception of Affect Task (PAT), a 140-item measure of the ability to match emotion stimuli. The PAT includes four subtasks that require the subject to match verbal or nonverbal emotion stimuli with verbal or nonverbal emotion responses. The subtasks include matching sentences and words (verbal-verbal), faces and words (nonverbal-verbal), sentences and faces (verbal-nonverbal), and faces and photographs of scenes (nonverbal-nonverbal). Across the entire sample, higher (alexithymic) TAS-20 and lower LEAS scores were both correlated with lower accuracy rates on each of the subtasks of the PAT (p < .001), accounting for 10.5% and 18.4% of the variance, respectively. Fifty-one subjects met TAS-20 criteria for alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals scored lower than other subjects on purely nonverbal matching, purely verbal matching, and mixed verbal-nonverbal matching (all p < .001). These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired verbal and nonverbal recognition of emotion stimuli and that the hallmark of alexithymia, a difficulty in putting emotion into words, may be a marker of a more general impairment in the capacity for emotion information processing.

Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions in Alexithymia

“…Our results are consistent with previous studies in which authors have presented images of facial expressions taken from FACS (Allerdings, 1997;Lane et al, 1996Lane et al, , 2000McDonald & Prkachin, 1990;Mann et al, 1994;Pandey & Mandal, 1997;Parker et al, 2005;Prkachin et al, 2009;Reker et al, 2010), as well as those who have had facial micro-expressions (Swart, Kortekeer, & German, 2009), and degraded presentations of facial expressions that hinder its recognition (Kätsyri et al, 2008). On the other hand, studies using the affective priming task (Suslow, 1998;Suslow & Junghanns, 2001;Suslow et al, 2001) have showed inconsistent results.…”

“…In this line, previous studies have shown a significant correlation between alexithymia and a lack of ability to recognize emotions in photographs of facial expressions (Allerdings, 1997;Lane et al, 1996Lane et al, , 2000Mann, Wise, Trinidad, & Kohanski, 1994;McDonald & Prkachin, 1990;Pandey & Mandal, 1997;Parker et al, 1993;Parker, Prkachin, & Prkachin, 2005;Prkachin, Casey, & Prkachin, 2009). These deficits have been found with tasks in which participants were required to reply in a very short period of time (Pedrosa et al, 2009), as well as in those with masked stimuli to make it difficult to recognize them (Kugel et al, 2008;Reker et al, 2010), and with static emotional stimuli, such as FACS, and dynamic videos (Kätsyri, Saalasti, Tiippana, von Wendt, & Sams, 2008;Ridout, Thomas, & Wallis, 2010) (for a review, see Grynberg et al, 2012).…”

The Moderating Role of Attachment Styles on the Relationship between Alexithymia and Interpersonal Problems in an Iranian Population

“…Studies have shown that people with alexithymia have difficulty in identifying the emotion of others from their face (e.g., Lane et al, 1996). Recognizing emotions play an important role on interpersonal relations.…”

The Role of Alexithymia in Reduced Eye-Fixation in Autism Spectrum Conditions

“…Thus, impaired representation of the emotional state of the self in alexithymia would lead to impaired representation of the other's emotion, which may be manifested as impaired recognition of emotion. Several studies support this conjecture, reporting impaired recognition of facial emotion in alexithymia (Mann et al 1994;Parker et al 1993;Jessimer and Markham 1997;Lane et al 1996Lane et al , 2000Prkachin et al 2009). The reliance of accurate emotion recognition on typical visual scan paths to emotional face stimuli (Aviezer et al 2008;Calder et al 2000;Smith et al 2005;Wong et al 2005), makes it possible that the impaired emotion recognition in individuals with alexithymia is due to atypical attention to the eye and mouth regions of emotional face stimuli.…”