Pervasive emotion recognition deficit common to alexithymia and the repressive coping style

Objective: Previous research has demonstrated a deficit in the ability to r ecognize emotions in alexithymic individuals. The repressive coping style i s thought to preferentially impair the detection of unpleasant compared wit h pleasant emotions, and the degree of deficit is typically thought to be l ess severe than in alexithymia. We compared emotion recognition ability in both individuals with alexithymia and those with the repressive coping styl e. Methods: Three hundred seventy-nine subjects completed the 20-item Toron to Alexithymia Scale, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale, the Marlowe- Crowne Scale (a measure of repressive defensiveness), the Bendig Short Form of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Perception of Affect Task. T he Perception of Affect Task consists of four 35-item emotion recognition s ubtasks: matching sentences and words, faces and words, sentences and faces , and faces and photographs of scenes. The stimuli in each subtask consist of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and neutral) depicted five times each. Recognition accuracy results were collap sed across subtasks within each emotion category. Results: Highly alexithym ic subjects (for all, p < .01) and those with low emotional awareness (for all, p < .001) were consistently less accurate in emotion recognition in al l seven categories. Highly defensive subjects (including repressors) were l ess accurate in the detection of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness (for a ll, p < .05). Furthermore, scores on the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scal e accounted for significantly more variance in performance on the Perceptio n of Affect Task than scores on tbe Marlowe-Crowne Scale (p < .01). Conclus ions: The results indicate that alexithymia and the repressive coping style are each associated with impairments in the recognition of both pleasant a nd unpleasant emotions and that the two styles of emotional self-regulation differ more in the magnitude than in the quality of these impairments.