Alexithymia and deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotional states

Luminet, Olivier [UCL]

Alexithymia is a multidimensional personality construct encompassing three facets: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, a reduced capacity to engage in fantasy and other imaginal activities and an externally-oriented cognitive style. In the present talk, I would like to present data supporting the view that the alexithymia facets reflect a deficit in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotional states. In one study, we explored the relations between alexithymia and emotional responding across different contexts: (1) initial exposure to an emotion-evoking movie, (2) second exposure to that stimulus, (3) reports of rumination and social sharing, and (4) describing their emotional response (verbal re-evocation). The main result was that facets of the alexithymia construct were associated at the initial exposure with lower emotional responses at the cognitive/experiential level, but with higher emotional responses at the physiological level as measured by heart rate suggesting some dissociations between components of emotional responding. In more recent studies, we explored the implicit abilities of high alexithymia scorers to process affectively congruent vs. incongruent prime-target pairs, using the affective priming paradigm. I will present three studies that consistently showed lower facilitation effects for higher alexithymia scorers when congruent pairs involved the presentation of an angry face followed by a negative verbal target. These results suggest that alexithymia could be related to a difficulty to process and automatically use high arousal emotional information to respond to concomittant behavioural demands.