Dealing with Feelings: Characterization of Trait Alexithymia on Emotion Regulation Strategies and Cognitive-Emotional Processing
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BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, or "no words for feelings", is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in emotion recognition and regulation. It is unknown whether this deficit is due primarily to regulation, perception, or mentalizing of emotions. In order to shed light on the core deficit, we tested our subjects on a wide range of emotional tasks. We expected the high alexithymics to underperform on all tasks. METHOD: Two groups of healthy individuals, high and low scoring on the cognitive component of the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire, completed questionnaires of emotion regulation and performed several emotion processing tasks including a micro expression recognition task, recognition of emotional prosody and semantics in spoken sentences, an emotional and identity learning task and a conflicting beliefs and emotions task (emotional mentalizing). RESULTS: The two groups differed on the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire and Empathy Quotient. Specifically, the Emotion Regulation Quotient showed that alexithymic individuals used more suppressive and less reappraisal strategies. On the behavioral tasks, as expected, alexithymics performed worse on recognition of micro expressions and emotional mentalizing. Surprisingly, groups did not differ on tasks of emotional semantics and prosody and associative emotional-learning. CONCLUSION: Individuals scoring high on the cognitive component of alexithymia are more prone to suppressive emotion regulation strategies rather than reappraisal strategies. Regarding emotional information processing, alexithymia is associated with reduced performance on measures of early processing as well as higher order mentalizing. However, difficulties in the processing of emotional language were not a core deficit in our alexithymic group.
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Alexithymia is not entirely equivalent to emotional dysregulation but encapsulates it in combination with difficulty identifying and understanding one's emotions.
“This construct is not entirely equivalent to emotional dysregulation (operationalised by Maddox et al. with the Emotion Regulation Scale [75]), but encapsulates the latter in combination with difficulty identifying and understanding one’s emotions [76, 77].”
From A 'choice', an 'addiction', a way 'out of the lost': Exploring self-injury in autistic people without intellectual disability (2019) · cites this paper as [76]
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- Authors
- Swart, M., Kortekaas, R., & Aleman, A.
- Affiliations
- University Medical Center Groningen (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Swart, Marte
- ORCID
- Aleman, André
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2009-06-03
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- e5751
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2685011
- OpenAlex
- W2133156861
- Cited by
- 338
- References
- 49
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 31 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 27 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 3.39
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- University of Groningen research database (University of Groningen / Centre for Information Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- European Science Foundation (044035001)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- emotion regulation, emotion regulation strategies, emotional suppression, emotion reappraisal, emotional prosody, emotional semantics, emotional learning, empathy
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Affective Symptoms, Cognition, Emotions, Empathy, Female, Humans, Learning, Male, Personality, Surveys and Questionnaires, Semantics, Reproducibility of Results
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