Wingbermühle Ellen, Theunissen Hanneke, Verhoeven Willem M A, Kessels Roy P C, Egger Jos I M
Centre of Excellence for Neuropsychiatry, Vincent van Gogh Institute for Psychiatry, Venray, The Netherlands.
Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Acta Neuropsychiatr. 2012 Apr;24(2):67-80. doi: 10.1111/j.1601-5215.2011.00613.x.
Alexithymia refers to an ineffective regulation and expression of emotions. It constitutes a major risk factor for a range of medical and psychiatric problems, including chronic pain, somatisation, anxiety and depression. Alexithymia is a multi-faceted concept, described in terms of cognitive and affective aspects. From a neuropsychological perspective, alexithymia can be defined as a disturbance in affective information processing and social cognition. As the growing literature on brain structures involved in alexithymia is fragmented and sometimes even contradictory, the aim of this article was to review findings on neural substrates with regard to their convergence.
A narrative review was performed, including both early neuropsychological and more recent imaging studies, in order to achieve a better understanding of the aetiology of alexithymia.
Corpus callosum, cingulate cortex and insula are clearly involved in alexithymia. The amygdala and the orbitofrontal part of the cortex appear to be implicated as mediators, because of their broader involvement in emotional processing and executive control.
Notwithstanding the diffuse neural representation, the alexithymia construct can be usefully applied in the clinical and empirical studies of social cognition, particularly when adopting a dimensional neuropsychological approach.
述情障碍是指情绪调节和表达无效。它是一系列医学和精神问题的主要危险因素，包括慢性疼痛、躯体化、焦虑和抑郁。述情障碍是一个多方面的概念，从认知和情感方面进行描述。从神经心理学角度来看，述情障碍可定义为情感信息处理和社会认知的紊乱。由于关于述情障碍所涉及脑结构的文献日益增多且零散，有时甚至相互矛盾，本文旨在综述关于神经基质的研究结果及其趋同性。
进行了一项叙述性综述，包括早期神经心理学研究和近期影像学研究，以便更好地理解述情障碍的病因。
胼胝体、扣带回皮质和脑岛明显与述情障碍有关。杏仁核和皮质的眶额部分似乎作为调节因子参与其中，因为它们更广泛地参与情绪处理和执行控制。
尽管神经表征较为分散，但述情障碍这一概念在社会认知的临床和实证研究中仍可有效应用，特别是在采用维度神经心理学方法时。
