Ilya Nudnou¹ (), Benjamin Balas¹; ¹North Dakota State University

Alexithymia is a personality trait defined as a difficulty of identifying, describing, and distinguishing between one’s feelings. Individuals with high alexithymia symptoms also exhibit deficits in categorizing facial expressions, but retain the ability to discriminate emotional expressions. In three experiments, we presented emotional faces and scenes to participants with varying alexithymia severity to further explore the impact of alexithymia on the visual recognition of emotional content. In experiment 1 (N=98), we presented upright and inverted emotional faces and scenes depicting the emotions of anger, fear, and sadness, and asked participants to categorize these images. In experiment 2 (N=81), the same faces and scenes were presented during an odd-one-out discrimination task. Finally, in experiment 3 (N=73), the same faces and scenes were used in a Stroop-like task to examine interactions between face and scene emotional content. Neither accuracy nor reaction time data correlated with alexithymia severity in experiments 1 and 2. In experiment 3, participants with more severe alexithymia were slower at categorizing fear and sad scenes, and sad faces. Scene categorization accuracy was significantly lower during incongruent trials in experiment 3 compared to experiment 1, implying that emotional faces interfered with emotional scenes during categorization, but not vice-versa. Further, the differences in reaction times between experiment 1 and 3 demonstrate that individuals with alexithymia are still sensitive to the congruence of emotion categories perceived from different stimulus types. Altogether, our results demonstrate that people with alexithymia display difficulties with emotion categorization of face and scene stimuli, suggesting a general deficit in the recognition of emotional content.