Abstract

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality trait linked to increased risk for psychological, psychosomatic, and physical health problems. One hypothesized mechanism through which alexithymia predisposes individuals to such problems is the interference of alexithymic characteristics in processing affective, particularly unpleasant content. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between alexithymia and biases in attentional processing of threatening vs. neutral pictorial stimuli, disentangling early (vigilance) from late (maintenance) attentional biases. One hundred participants (77 female; 18–35 years old) completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and underwent a free viewing task with picture pairs presenting illness, fear and neutral content, during which dwell time on each picture was recorded at time intervals of 0–500 ms, 501–1000 ms and 1001–6500 ms of exposure. Results from multilevel modeling showed that alexithymia interacted with time interval and picture type. Higher alexithymia scores were related to less dwell time towards fear pictures at 501 ms-1000 ms, but more dwell time at 1001 ms-6500 ms after stimulus onset. This effect was particularly observed for the externally oriented thinking and the difficulty in describing feelings facets of alexithymia, but not the difficulty in identifying feelings. There was no effect of alexithymia on early vigilance at 0–500 ms. This study provides evidence on the association between alexithymic traits and early avoidance, along with late maintenance bias to fear, which appears consistent with the view that alexithymia is associated with avoidant emotion regulation processes, but also greater requirements of cognitive resources for processing affective information.

摘要

述情障碍是一种多方面的人格特征，与心理、心身和身体健康问题的风险增加有关。述情障碍使个体易患此类问题的一种假设机制是述情障碍特征在处理情感，特别是不愉快的内容时的干扰。本研究旨在调查述情障碍与对威胁性与中性图像刺激的注意处理偏差之间的关系，将早期（警惕）与晚期（维持）注意偏差分开。100 名参与者（77 名女性；18-35 岁）完成了多伦多述情障碍量表并接受了一项免费观看任务，其中包含呈现疾病、恐惧和中性内容的图片对，在此期间以 0- 的时间间隔记录每张图片的停留时间500 毫秒，501–1000 ms 和 1001–6500 ms 的曝光。多层次建模的结果表明，述情障碍与时间间隔和图片类型相互作用。较高的述情障碍评分与在 501 ms-1000 ms 时恐惧图片的停留时间较短有关，但在刺激开始后 1001 ms-6500 ms 时的停留时间较长。这种效应在外向思维和描述述情障碍的感受方面的困难中尤其明显，但在识别感受方面的困难则没有。述情障碍对 0-500 毫秒的早期警觉没有影响。这项研究提供了述情障碍特征与早期回避之间关联的证据，以及对恐惧的晚期维持偏见，这似乎与述情障碍与回避情绪调节过程相关的观点一致，