Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions in Alexithymia

Autor: Francisco Martinez-Sanchez, Enrique G. Fernández-Abascal, Noelia Sánchez-Pérez
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: Studia Psychologica, Vol 59, Iss 3, Pp 206-216 (2017)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 0039-3320
2585-8815
DOI: 10.21909/sp.2017.03.741
Popis: Alexithymia is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in identifying and verbalizing emotions. Previous studies have shown a significant association between alexithymia and a lack of ability to decode emotional facial expressions. Three groups of university students (N = 1645) were formed by splitting the sample based on Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) scores. All participants performed an emotional expression recognition task, using the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes’’ method. The experimenter presented images of the eye-region of the faces of actors and actresses. As expected, results showed that alexithymics performed worse on ability to infer others’ emotional states expressed by the eyes. These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired emotion recognition, that is most apparent when processing capacity is restricted, high-alexithymic individuals could develop less detailed perceptual representations of facial expression which might impair the process of drawing conclusions about its emotional significance.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals