Research Proposal: Investigating emotional expression detection in alexithymia

Alexithymia is associated with impairments in labelling, recognising, and expressing emotions [1]. It has been found to explain emotion recognition deficits observed in clinical samples [2, 3], and may be a risk-marker for illness severity in mental disorders. Despite the importance of understanding alexithymia, it remains unclear which stages of processing alexithymia affects. In individuals with typical emotion expression recognition, rapid emotion detection may occur without conscious awareness [4, 5]. Thus far, research has observed deficits in those high in alexithymia at identifying and categorising emotional expressions [6], but little is known about whether these deficits occur due to differential attentional or prioritisation mechanisms for emotional faces. There is some evidence to suggest abnormal early emotion processing in alexithymia; amygdala activation in response to masked emotional expressions is correlated with trait alexithymia [7]. It is possible that if emotion detection mechanisms are impaired in alexithymia, this has a pervasive detrimental effect on subsequent stages of emotional face processing. This project will investigate emotional expression detection in individuals high and low in trait alexithymia.