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Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia
BACKGROUND: Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing emotions. Few studies have investigated how alexithymia influences decision-making under different conditions (ambiguity and risk). This study aimed to examine whether alexithymia contributes to impairment in decisio...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5704455/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29179707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1537-2 |
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author | Zhang, Lei Wang, Xue Zhu, Yu Li, Hongchen Zhu, Chunyan Yu, Fengqiong Wang, Kai |
author_facet | Zhang, Lei Wang, Xue Zhu, Yu Li, Hongchen Zhu, Chunyan Yu, Fengqiong Wang, Kai |
author_sort | Zhang, Lei |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing emotions. Few studies have investigated how alexithymia influences decision-making under different conditions (ambiguity and risk). This study aimed to examine whether alexithymia contributes to impairment in decision-making. METHOD: This study included 42 participants with high scores in the Chinese version of Toronto Alexithymia Scale (alexithymia group), and 44 matched subjects with low scores (control group). Decision-making was measured using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Game of Dice Task (GDT). RESULTS: The main findings of this study revealed selective deficits in IGT performance for the alexithymia group, while GDT performance was unimpaired when compared with the control group. In IGT, total netscores were lower for the alexithymia group compared to the control group, particularly with regard to block 5. Moreover, the alexithymia individuals selected significantly more adverse cards than the controls, indicating significant decision-making impairments. CONCLUSION: Alexithymia selectively influences decision-making under ambiguity. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5704455 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57044552017-12-05 Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia Zhang, Lei Wang, Xue Zhu, Yu Li, Hongchen Zhu, Chunyan Yu, Fengqiong Wang, Kai BMC Psychiatry Research Article BACKGROUND: Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing emotions. Few studies have investigated how alexithymia influences decision-making under different conditions (ambiguity and risk). This study aimed to examine whether alexithymia contributes to impairment in decision-making. METHOD: This study included 42 participants with high scores in the Chinese version of Toronto Alexithymia Scale (alexithymia group), and 44 matched subjects with low scores (control group). Decision-making was measured using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Game of Dice Task (GDT). RESULTS: The main findings of this study revealed selective deficits in IGT performance for the alexithymia group, while GDT performance was unimpaired when compared with the control group. In IGT, total netscores were lower for the alexithymia group compared to the control group, particularly with regard to block 5. Moreover, the alexithymia individuals selected significantly more adverse cards than the controls, indicating significant decision-making impairments. CONCLUSION: Alexithymia selectively influences decision-making under ambiguity. BioMed Central 2017-11-28 /pmc/articles/PMC5704455/ /pubmed/29179707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1537-2 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Zhang, Lei Wang, Xue Zhu, Yu Li, Hongchen Zhu, Chunyan Yu, Fengqiong Wang, Kai Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title | Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title_full | Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title_fullStr | Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title_full_unstemmed | Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title_short | Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
title_sort | selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5704455/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29179707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1537-2 |
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