RECOGNITION OF EMOTIONAL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IN ALEXITHYMIA

• Authors: Martinez-Sanchez Francisco , Fernández-Abascal Enrique G. , Sánchez-Pérez Noelia
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Alexithymia is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in identifying and verbalizing emotions. Previous studies have shown a significant association between alexithymia and a lack of ability to decode emotional facial expressions. Three groups of university students (N = 1645) were formed by splitting the sample based on Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) scores. All participants performed an emotional expression recognition task, using the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes’’ method. The experimenter presented images of the eye-region of the faces of actors and actresses. As expected, results showed that alexithymics performed worse on ability to infer others’ emotional states expressed by the eyes. These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired emotion recognition, that is most apparent when processing capacity is restricted, high-alexithymic individuals could develop less detailed perceptual representations of facial expression which might impair the process of drawing conclusions about its emotional significance.

Keywords

EN

ALEXITHYMIA; EYES EXPRESSION; RECOGNITION; EMOTION; EYES TEST

• Publisher: Institute of Experimental Psychology, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Studia Psychologica
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 206 – 216

Contributors

author

Martinez-Sanchez Francisco

• Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain

author

Fernández-Abascal Enrique G.

author

Sánchez-Pérez Noelia

Identifiers

DOI

10.21909/sp.2017.03.741