آلکسیتیمیا و درک احساسات حالات صورت

The goal was to provide a clear test of deficits in perception of emotion in alexithymia by investigating the ability to detect and rate the intensity of facial expressions of emotion. Alexithymia was assessed by the 20-item Toronto alexithymia scale (TAS 20). In the first study, using signal detection methods, alexithymia was found to be associated with difficulties in detection of anger, sadness, and fear in a sample of 128 students. In the second study, there was a marked reduction of ratings of the intensity of the expression of fear among a sample of 43 students scoring high or low on the TAS 20. Characterization of the perceptual deficit was provided by its correlation with Externally-Oriented Thinking. The emotion perception deficit would make it difficult negotiating the socio-emotional world, potentially leading to avoidable stress and conflict.

Alexithymia is the term applied to a clinical condition and a trait characterized by difficulties processing emotion (Sifneos, 1973 and Taylor et al., 1997). People described as alexithymic have difficulty finding words for feelings and show associated deficits in communicating emotions to others (McDonald & Prkachin, 1990). Several investigators have found people with alexithymic characteristics to be less accurate in recognition of emotional expressions (Jessimer and Markham, 1997, Lane et al., 1996, Lane et al., 2000, Parker et al., 2005 and Parker et al., 1993). A number of paradigms make it possible to dissociate decoding and language deficits in perceptual mechanisms underlying facial recognition. The availability of a standardized set of facial expressions of emotion (Ekman & Friesen, 1976) has enabled the development of procedures in which perceptual, memory, attention and cognitive processes involved in facial affect can be assessed. Both signal detection (Prkachin, 2003) and reaction time paradigms (Calder, Young, Keane, & Dean, 2000) are sensitive to subtle differences in the perception of emotional expressions. These studies of the perception of facial expressions provide indirect evidence of a dissociation of the language requirement from perceptual processing (Prkachin, 2003). General models of perception, cognition, memory, language and emotion highlight the notion that there is an interactive component to these processes. This raises questions about the impact of emotion processing on detection as opposed to recognition of emotional signals. This study used a paradigm that minimizes recognition and language requirements and is sensitive to difficulties in perceiving facial expressions of emotion (Prkachin, 2003). It was designed to be a clearer test of the hypothesis that alexithymics are deficient in processing facial affective information.