NEURO - Dissertações de mestrado
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- Emotional processing in alexithymia: Behavioral evidencePublication . Luís, Ana Isabel Dias dos Santos; Mares, InêsSocial cognition plays a crucial role in primate survival. A key facet of social cognition is the recognition of others’ emotions, which facilitates social interactions by providing insights into others’ mental states and enabling us to adjust our behaviors accordingly. This dissertation focuses on understanding emotional processing deficits associated with alexithymia - a personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing emotions - in a neurotypical population. To achieve this goal, we designed two experiments to investigate whether the emotional processing deficits associated with alexithymia extend to neutral expressions (Experiment I) and to explore their possible connection to altered holistic processing (Experiment II). In both experiments, perceptual difficulty was increased by adding visual noise, known to exacerbate alexithymia-related deficits. Alexithymia traits were independently measured using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). In the first experiment, 35 university students were presented with 30 images of fearful faces, neutral faces, and objects, which they were asked to categorize. Results showed lower accuracy across all categories associated with increasing alexithymia scores. In the second experiment, 90 upright and inverted faces (displaying fear, happiness, and neutral expressions) were presented to 49 university students in a similar design to Experiment I. Participants with higher alexithymia scores performed worse when holistic processing was disrupted by image inversion, compared to upright presentation. Our analysis suggests that individuals with higher levels of alexithymia exhibit a general impairment in perceptual categorization, contrasting with the anticipated emotion-specific deficits (Experiment I) and rely on holistic processing (Experiment II).