Lane R D, Sechrest L, Riedel R, Shapiro D E, Kaszniak A W
Department of Psychiatry, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
Psychosom Med. 2000 Jul-Aug;62(4):492-501. doi: 10.1097/00006842-200007000-00007.
Previous research has demonstrated a deficit in the ability to recognize emotions in alexithymic individuals. The repressive coping style is thought to preferentially impair the detection of unpleasant compared with pleasant emotions, and the degree of deficit is typically thought to be less severe than in alexithymia. We compared emotion recognition ability in both individuals with alexithymia and those with the repressive coping style.
Three hundred seventy-nine subjects completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale, the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (a measure of repressive defensiveness), the Bendig Short Form of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Perception of Affect Task. The Perception of Affect Task consists of four 35-item emotion recognition subtasks: matching sentences and words, faces and words, sentences and faces, and faces and photographs of scenes. The stimuli in each subtask consist of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and neutral) depicted five times each. Recognition accuracy results were collapsed across subtasks within each emotion category.
Highly alexithymic subjects (for all, p<.01) and those with low emotional awareness (for all, p<.001) were consistently less accurate in emotion recognition in all seven categories. Highly defensive subjects (including repressors) were less accurate in the detection of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness (for all, p<.05). Furthermore, scores on the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale accounted for significantly more variance in performance on the Perception of Affect Task than scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (p<.01).
The results indicate that alexithymia and the repressive coping style are each associated with impairments in the recognition of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions and that the two styles of emotional self-regulation differ more in the magnitude than in the quality of these impairments.
先前的研究表明，述情障碍个体在识别情绪的能力方面存在缺陷。压抑应对方式被认为与愉悦情绪相比，会优先损害对不愉快情绪的察觉，并且这种缺陷程度通常被认为不如述情障碍严重。我们比较了述情障碍个体和具有压抑应对方式个体的情绪识别能力。
379名受试者完成了20项多伦多述情障碍量表、情绪觉察水平量表、马洛-克劳恩量表（一种压抑防御性的测量工具）、泰勒显性焦虑量表的本迪格简式量表以及情感感知任务。情感感知任务由四个35项的情绪识别子任务组成：句子与单词匹配、面部与单词匹配、句子与面部匹配以及面部与场景照片匹配。每个子任务中的刺激由七种情绪（快乐、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧、厌恶、惊讶和中性）组成，每种情绪呈现五次。每个情绪类别内的子任务的识别准确性结果进行了汇总。
高度述情障碍的受试者（所有情况，p<.01）和情绪觉察水平低的受试者（所有情况，p<.001）在所有七个类别中的情绪识别准确性始终较低。高度防御性的受试者（包括压抑者）在识别愤怒、悲伤、恐惧和快乐方面准确性较低（所有情况，p<.05）。此外，情绪觉察水平量表的得分在情感感知任务表现上解释的方差显著多于马洛-克劳恩量表的得分（p<.01）。
结果表明，述情障碍和压抑应对方式均与愉悦和不愉快情绪识别受损有关，并且这两种情绪自我调节方式在这些损伤的程度而非质量上差异更大。
