Social-specific impairment of negative emotion perception in alexithymia

Abstract

Alexithymia has been characterized as an impaired ability of emotion processing and regulation. The definition of alexithymia does not include a social component. However, there is some evidence that social cognition may be compromised in individuals with alexithymia. Hence, emotional impairments associated with alexithymia may extend to socially relevant information. Here, we recorded electrophysiological responses of individuals meeting the clinically relevant cut-off for alexithymia (ALEX; n=24) and individuals without alexithymia (NonALEX; n=23) while they viewed affective scenes that varied on the dimensions of sociality and emotional valence during a rapid serial visual presentation task. We found that ALEX exhibited lower accuracy and larger N2 than NonALEX in the perception of social negative scenes. Source reconstruction revealed that the group difference in N2 was localized at the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Irrespective of emotional valence, ALEX showed stronger alpha power than NonALEX in social but not nonsocial conditions. Our findings support the hypothesis of social processing being selectively affected by alexithymia, especially for stimuli with negative valence. Electrophysiological evidence suggests altered deployment of attentional resources in the perception of social-specific emotional information in alexithymia. This work sheds light on the neuropsychopathology of alexithymia and alexithymia-related disorders.

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying fear-biased adaptation learning in changing environments

“…Alexithymia has been considered as a transdiagnostic risk factor for various affective disorders, such as anxiety and depression 62,63 . While a rich literature showed both cognitive and emotional deficits in alexithymia 47,42,64,65 , the current results further suggest an integrative difficulty between fear and adaptation to volatility with higher alexithymia levels in healthy individuals. Given that abnormalities in regulating fearful signals are at the core of affective disorders 6 and failure to appropriately adjust learning to dynamic environments contributes to affective disorders 17,[22][23][24] , our findings provide additional insights into pathological mechanisms of alexithymia-related affective disorders.…”

“…However, in our recent study, we did not find impaired emotion-cognition integration in alexithymia 66 . One possible explanation may be that the stimuli used in our previous study merely displayed isolated parts of the human body and thus lacked social-emotional features 67 , whose processing seems to be particularly impaired in relation to alexithymia 65 . Therefore, impaired fear-biased adaptation to volatility in alexithymia may be social-specific.…”

Oscillatory dynamics underlying emotion-cognition integration: differential role of theta and alpha oscillations

“…One possible explanation may be that the stimuli used here merely displayed isolated parts of the human body and thus lacked social-emotional features (Britton et al, 2006;Powers et al, 2013). In a previous study, we reported social-specific impairment for negative emotion processing in alexithymia (Wang, S Goerlich, et al, 2021). Future studies could examine the integrative processing between emotion and cognition in relation to alexithymia with socially relevant materials.…”

Perceptive and affective impairments in emotive eye-region processing in alexithymia

“…In addition, the emotion recognition ability of an amygdala-damaged patient improved after explicitly being instructed to look at the eyes. Our recent study showed social-specific impairments of negative emotion processing in alexithymia ( Wang et al. , 2021 ).…”

“…Recent evidence showed that alpha signals can be reliably detected with these parameters ( Fang et al. , 2020 ; Wang et al. , 2021 ).…”