School of Psychology, 1724University of Birmingham, UK.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, the Netherlands.
Psychol Rep. 2022 Jun;125(3):1363-1379. doi: 10.1177/00332941211005118. Epub 2021 Mar 31.
Alexithymia concerns a difficulty identifying and communicating one's own emotions, and a tendency towards externally-oriented thinking. Recent work argues that such alexithymic traits are due to altered arousal response and poor subjective awareness of "objective" arousal responses. Although there are individual differences within the general population in identifying and describing emotions, extant research has focused on highly alexithymic individuals. Here we investigated whether mean arousal and concordance between subjective and objective arousal underpin individual differences in alexithymic traits in a general population sample. Participants rated subjective arousal responses to 60 images from the International Affective Picture System whilst their skin conductance was recorded. The Autism Quotient was employed to control for autistic traits in the general population. Analysis using linear models demonstrated that mean arousal significantly predicted Toronto Alexithymia Scale scores above and beyond autistic traits, but concordance scores did not. This indicates that, whilst objective arousal is a useful predictor in populations that are both above and below the cut-off values for alexithymia, concordance scores between objective and subjective arousal do not predict variation in alexithymic traits in the general population.
述情障碍涉及识别和表达自己情绪的困难，以及倾向于外向思维。最近的研究认为，这种述情障碍特征是由于唤醒反应改变和对“客观”唤醒反应的主观意识差。尽管在一般人群中存在识别和描述情绪的个体差异，但现有研究主要集中在高度述情障碍个体上。在这里，我们研究了在一般人群样本中，主观和客观唤醒之间的平均唤醒和一致性是否为述情障碍特征的个体差异提供了基础。参与者对来自国际情感图片系统的 60 张图片的主观唤醒反应进行评分，同时记录他们的皮肤电导。采用孤独症特质问卷来控制一般人群中的孤独症特质。线性模型分析表明，在考虑到孤独症特质后，平均唤醒显著预测多伦多述情障碍量表评分，但一致性评分则没有。这表明，虽然客观唤醒对于处于述情障碍分界值上下的人群都是一个有用的预测指标，但客观和主观唤醒之间的一致性评分并不能预测一般人群中述情障碍特征的变化。
