Alexithymia and the Evaluation of Emotionally Valenced Scenes

Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing feelings (DIF and DDF) and an externally oriented thinking (EOT) style. The primary aim of the present study was to investigate links between alexithymia and the evaluation of emotional scenes. We also investigated whether viewers’ evaluations of emotional scenes were better predicted by specific alexithymic traits or by individual differences in sensory processing sensitivity (SPS). Participants (N = 106) completed measures of alexithymia and SPS along with a task requiring speeded judgments of the pleasantness of 120 moderately arousing scenes. We did not replicate laterality effects previously described with the scene perception task. Compared to those with weak alexithymic traits, individuals with moderate-to-strong alexithymic traits were less likely to classify positively valenced scenes as pleasant and were less likely to classify scenes with (vs. without) implied motion (IM) in a way that was consistent with normative scene valence ratings. In addition, regression analyses confirmed that reporting strong EOT and a tendency to be easily overwhelmed by busy sensory environments negatively predicted classification accuracy for positive scenes, and that both DDF and EOT negatively predicted classification accuracy for scenes depicting IM. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for stimulus characteristics and individual differences in specific traits associated with alexithymia and SPS when investigating the processing of emotional stimuli. Learning more about the links between these individual difference variables may have significant clinical implications, given that alexithymia is an important, transdiagnostic risk factor for a wide range of psychopathologies.