The Alexithymics’ Characteristics Of Automatic Processing In Different Type Of Information’s Emotionality

The conception of alexithymia was first referred by Sifnoes and his colleagues in1972. Alexithymia is a multifaceted construct comprising (a) difficulty identifyingfeelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotionalarousal; (b) difficulty describing feelings to others; (c) a restricted imagination, asevidenced by a paucity of fantasies; and (d) a cognitive style that is literal, utilitarian,and externally oriented (Taylor & Bagby, 2000). In essence, alenithymia is not only akind of multidimensional personality structure, it is a common risk factor that can leadto a lot of mental disorder. For example it can make one easy to risk psychosomaticdisease, neurosis, substance, PTSD and so on. And it also can reduce their clinical. Soit gradually attracts the attention of psychosis and Psychology. Because there is aconsiderable proportion of alexithymics in different crowd, experts had regardedalexithymia as a part of Era personality. In the present the studies of alexithymia athome and abroad has confirmed that the alexithymics have deficit in emotionalprocessing in verbal, nonverbal, ERP,EEG, memory or stroop paradigm. OlivierLumineta（2006）and his colleagues used affective priming paradigm to check thatalexithymia could disturb emotional information’s automatic processing. Specificallyaffective priming effect will reduced by subjects’points rising in alexithymia,reported overall deficit in emotional automatic processing. In Olivier Lumineta’sexperiment, he Respectively used words and picture of face as priming stimulate, andthen asked subjects to judge words’emotion. He got the results of that the alexithymiahas significant Moderating effect in angry face, proof of that the alexithymics hasdeficit in emotional information’s automatic processing. According to this study, thescholars of our country jinyao Yi (2007), used positive, negative and nonemotionalpictures as his studies’material. He used supraliminal and subliminal affectivepriming paradigm to investigate the characteristics of affective priming effects ofalexithymics and examine their deficit of emotional automatic processing. Insubliminal affective priming task, there were no differences of correct rates andlatencies between alexithymics and nonalexithymics. In suprali -minal priming task,the latency of alexithymics was longer than that of nonalexithymics. That is to sayalexithymics have deficit in automatic processing for emotional information they areaware of, but not for those can not be aware. In this study we mainly through thedifference of different emotional information’s automatic processing betweenalexithymics and nonalexithymics, to investigate the difference between alexithymicsand nonalexithymics in emotional automatic processing.This study has three experiments, in experiment 1, we mainly explore thecharacters between high and low alexithymic group in verbal emotional information’sautomatic processing. In experiment 2, we mainly explore the characters between high and low alexithymic group in nonverbal emotional information’s automaticprocessing. In experiment 3 we mainly explore the characters between high and lowalexithymic group in face emotional information’s automatic processing. We can havethe conclusion that :1 The alexithymics have completely defect in identifying verbal, nonverbal andface emotional information.2 The alexithymics have completely defect in verbal emotional information’sautomatic processing, but when the priming program is picture or face, they havesome emotional information’s automatic processing.3 Different styles of target program have different identifying emotionalinformation’s difficultly. The picture is more difficult to identifying than words andface. From harder to easier are picture, face, words.4 Weather the affective priming effect appear or not, doesn’t depend on the styleof priming program and target program, but depend on the valence of primingprogram and target program.