Alexithymia and automatic processing of verbal and facial affect stimuli

Research on the automatic processing of affect in alexithymia is of great i mportance since faults in affect recognition at a controlled processing lev el may be due to impaired automatic processes. In this study, automatic pro cessing of verbal and non-verbal valence information was examined as a func tion of alexithymia. The 20-Item. Toronto-Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and the L evels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) were evaluated in 68 subjects (30 psychiatric inpatients and 38 normal subjects) along with two sequential p riming tasks that controlled for several task relevant variables. For word evaluation, high (TAS-) alexithymics showed a prime valence - target valenc e interaction, whereas low alexithymics exhibited a main effect prime valen ce. For face evaluation, no group differences were observed. The LEAS Self- score was found to predict affective priming for both priming tasks signifi cantly. It can be concluded that high alexithymics automatically assess the valence of verbal stimuli. However, high alexithymics seem to manifest a r educed processing engagement towards negative verbal stimuli at an automati c processing level.