Theory Of Mind Impairment In Alexithymia

Objective Theory of Mind(ToM) is referred to as the ability to infer self’s and otherpeople’s mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions. This ability is necessaryto understand and predict the behaviour of others. Alexithymia，“no words forfeelings”,is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation,difficulties in identifying, describing and communicating feelings, difficulties indifferentiating feelings from bodily sensations and affect-related fantasy. Previousstudys have revealed there is a general impairment of ToM in alexithymia. However,ToM is rich in content which could be divided into cognitive ToM and affective ToM.There have been few assessments and arguments of the selective impairment inaffective or cognitive componets. This study examines alexithymics’ performance onthree ToM tasks:Yoni Task,“Reading the mind in the Eyes” Task(RMET) and Theory ofMind Picture Sequencing Task(ToM PST), in order to assess ToM impairments inalexithymia by analysing affective and cognitive TOM and first and second ToM.Methods Experiment1:31alexithymics and30age,sex,education and StroopInterference Effects matched healthy controls were asked to completed Yoni Task. YoniTask can examine affective ToM, cognitive ToM, first order ToM and second order ToM.The accuracy scores that amounts of correct answers can be used to assess affectiveToM, cognitive ToM, first order affective ToM, second order affective ToM, first ordercognitive ToM, second order cognitive ToM. Experiment2:18alexithymics and15age,sex, education and Stroop Interference Effects matched healthy controls were asked tofinish “Reading the Mind in the eyes”Test(RMET) and ToM Picture SequencingTask(ToM PST) with Hi-Speed. The RMET is considered to measure affective ToM and ToM PST can measure cogitive ToM. The accurary scores that amounts of answercorrectly of the RMET and ToM PST,including the sequencing score of ToM PST,FixationTime and FixationCount in Area of Interest were been recorded to assess ToM.Results Experiment1：There were significant differences in affective ToM scoresbetween alexithymics and healthy controls((35.81±6.30)vs(39.83±6.02),t=-2.55,p<0.05).Particularly, alexithymics got significantly lower scores in second order affectiveToM((24.55±6.01)vs(28.80±6.04),t=-2.76,p<0.01). However, there were no differencesin cognitive ToM scores btween alexithymics and health controls((19.00±2.11)vs(19.43±2.13), t=-0.08, p>0.05). Experiment2：There were no significant differencesin RMET and ToM PST scoress(19.44vs14.07,Z=-1.600,P>0.05；18.61vs15.07，Z=-1.066，P>0.05) between alexithymics and healthy controls. Alexithymics took moreFixationTime and got more FixationCounts in Are of Interest on both RMET(13.94vs20.67，Z=-1.989，P<0.05；11.78vs23.27，Z=-3.471，P<0.01) and ToM PST(21.73vs13.06,Z=-2.567,P<0.01;22.93vs12.06,Z=-3.218,P<0.01).Conclusion Alexithymics demonstrate selective impairment in affective ToM, speciallyin second order affective ToM, not gerneral impairment in ToM.