Background Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing feelings, an externally oriented style of thinking, and a reduced inclination to imagination. Previous research has shown deficits in the recognition of emotional facial expressions in alexithymia and reductions of brain responsivity to emotional stimuli. Using an affective priming paradigm, we investigated automatic perception of facial emotions as a function of alexithymia at the behavioral and neural level. In addition to self-report scales, we applied an interview to assess alexithymic tendencies. Results During 3 T fMRI scanning, 49 healthy individuals judged valence of neutral faces preceded by briefly shown happy, angry, fearful, and neutral facial expressions. Alexithymia was assessed using the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ) and the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA). As expected, only negative correlations were found between alexithymic features and affective priming. The global level of self-reported alexithymia (as assessed by the TAS-20 and the BVAQ) was found to be related to less affective priming owing to angry faces. At the facet level, difficulties identifying feelings, difficulties analyzing feelings, and impoverished fantasy (as measured by the BVAQ) were correlated with reduced affective priming due to angry faces. Difficulties identifying feelings (BVAQ) correlated also with reduced affective priming due to fearful faces and reduced imagination (TSIA) was related to decreased affective priming due to happy faces. There was only one significant correlation between alexithymia dimensions and automatic brain response to masked facial emotions: TAS-20 alexithymia correlated with heightened brain response to masked happy faces in superior and medial frontal areas. Conclusions Our behavioral results provide evidence that alexithymic features are related in particular to less sensitivity for covert facial expressions of anger. The perceptual alterations could reflect impaired automatic recognition or integration of social anger signals into judgemental processes and might contribute to the problems in interpersonal relationships associated with alexithymia. Our findings suggest that self-report measures of alexithymia may have an advantage over interview-based tests as research tools in the field of emotion perception at least in samples of healthy individuals characterized by rather low levels of alexithymia.

中文翻译：

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述情障碍和面部情绪的自动处理：行为和神经发现

背景述情障碍是一种人格特质，其特征是难以识别和描述感受、外向型思维方式以及想象力下降。先前的研究表明，述情障碍患者对情绪面部表情的识别存在缺陷，并且大脑对情绪刺激的反应性降低。使用情感启动范式，我们研究了面部情绪的自动感知作为行为和神经水平述情障碍的函数。除了自我报告量表之外，我们还采用访谈来评估述情倾向。结果在 3 T fMRI 扫描期间，49 名健康个体判断了中性面孔的效价，然后短暂地表现出快乐、愤怒、恐惧和中性面部表情。使用 20 项多伦多述情障碍量表 (TAS-20)、Bermond-Vorst 述情障碍问卷 (BVAQ) 和多伦多述情障碍结构化访谈 (TSIA) 评估述情障碍。正如预期的那样，述情特征和情感启动之间只发现负相关。自我报告的述情障碍的全球水平（根据 TAS-20 和 BVAQ 的评估）被发现与愤怒的面孔导致的情感启动较少有关。在侧面层面上，识别感受困难、分析感受困难和幻想匮乏（通过 BVAQ 测量）与愤怒面孔导致的情感启动减少相关。识别感受困难（BVAQ）也与恐惧面孔导致的情感启动减少相关，想象力减少（TSIA）与快乐面孔导致的情感启动减少相关。述情障碍维度与大脑对掩盖面部情绪的自动反应之间只有一种显着相关性：TAS-20述情障碍与上额叶和内侧额叶区域对掩盖笑脸的大脑反应增强相关。结论 我们的行为结果提供了证据，表明述情障碍特征尤其与对愤怒的隐蔽面部表情的敏感性较低有关。知觉的改变可能反映出自动识别功能受损或社会愤怒信号整合到判断过程中的能力受损，并可能导致与述情障碍相关的人际关系问题。我们的研究结果表明，述情障碍的自我报告测量可能比基于访谈的测试作为情绪感知领域的研究工具具有优势，至少在以述情障碍水平较低为特征的健康个体样本中是这样。