A Research On The Recognition Of Emotional Facial Expressions And The Impairment Of Executive Function In Alexithymic Individuals

Alexithymia is characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing feelings.Defects in the processing of emotion cognition and regulation are a core at alexithymia.Thus, alexithymic individuals are always association with weak social adaptability and interpersonal indifference.They are also struggle to cope with stress situation.All of those contribute to bad effects on physical and mental health.Facial expression, as an important non-verbal way of communication, is one of the principal ways to convey the emotional information.Facial expression recognition can not only help to determine internal emotional state and intentions conveyed by the individuals,but also can promote the feedback and social interaction. Therefore, it’s essential to investigate the characteristics of facial expression recognition among alexithymic individuals.Studies has proposed that alexithymic individuals may suffer the impairment of executive function,especially the ability to suppress other interferential emotional information.However, the problem is that the empirical researches are still fewer and the research materials and methods are inconsistent. In daily life,the information we receive from facial expressions and other ways is not always consistent.The capability that individuals are keen to discover such conflicts and accordingly respond rapidly,can ensure the smooth conduct of social interaction.It is therefore necessary to explore facial expression recognition of alexithymic individuals among emotional conflict situations.To assess the characteristics of facial expression recognition in alexithymia and explore the the potential cognitive mechanism,we design two experiments including facial expressions naming task and assessment task,as well as emotional face-word stroop task.33 alexithymic individuals and 34 non-alexithymic individuals are screened by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS-20).The experimental materials are facialexpressions pictures, chosen from Chinese Facial Affective Picture System.All subjects are required to accept the facial expressions recoginition task(facial expressions naming task and assessment task) and emotional face-word stroop task.The results indicate that:(1)For seven basic facial expressions recognition ability,alexithymic individuals are weaker than non-alexithymic individuals.Among the various expressions, alexithymic individuals recognize happy facial expression best,they identify sad facial expression significantly better than other three kinds of negative facial expressions(anger, disgust, fear) and they are not good at identify the disgust,fear and anger facial expressions.(2)Alexithymic individuals name positive facial expression significantly better than the negative,but there is no significantly differences in the assessment task.(3)In the emotional conflict condition,alexithymic individuals show emotional consistency effect in facial expression recognition.(4)Alexithymic individuals can’t inhibit the emotional interference information well,they have defects in executive function.