Background: The concept of alexithymia is characterized by difficulties identifying and
describing one’s emotions. Alexithymic individuals are impaired in the recognition of
others’ emotional facial expressions. Alexithymia is quite common in patients suffering
from major depressive disorder. The face-in-the-crowd task is a visual search paradigm
that assesses processing of multiple facial emotions. In the present eye-tracking study,
the relationship between alexithymia and visual processing of facial emotions was
examined in clinical depression.
Materials and Methods: Gaze behavior and manual response times of 20 alexithymic
and 19 non-alexithymic depressed patients were compared in a face-in-the-crowd task.
Alexithymia was empirically measured via the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia-Scale. Angry,
happy, and neutral facial expressions of different individuals were shown as target and
distractor stimuli. Our analyses of gaze behavior focused on latency to the target face,
number of distractor faces fixated before fixating the target, number of target fixations,
and number of distractor faces fixated after fixating the target.
Results: Alexithymic patients exhibited in general slower decision latencies compared
to non-alexithymic patients in the face-in-the-crowd task. Patient groups did not differ
in latency to target, number of target fixations, and number of distractors fixated prior
to target fixation. However, after having looked at the target, alexithymic patients fixated
more distractors than non-alexithymic patients, regardless of expression condition.
Discussion: According to our results, alexithymia goes along with impairments in
visual processing of multiple facial emotions in clinical depression. Alexithymia appears
to be associated with delayed manual reaction times and prolonged scanning after
the first target fixation in depression, but it might have no impact on the early search
phase. The observed deficits could indicate difficulties in target identification and/or
decision-making when processing multiple emotional facial expressions. Impairments
of alexithymic depressed patients in processing emotions in crowds of faces seem not
limited to a specific affective valence. In group situations, alexithymic depressed patients
might be slowed in processing interindividual differences in emotional expressions
compared with non-alexithymic depressed patients. This could represent a disadvantage
in understanding non-verbal communication in groups.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:84487 |
| Date | 31 March 2023 |
| Creators | Suslow, Thomas, Günther, Vivien, Hensch, Tilman, Kersting, Anette, Bodenschatz, Charlott Maria |
| Publisher | Frontiers Research Foundation |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 1664-0640, 668019 |
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