Alexithymia and affective state recognition: an fMRI study on "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test

Alexithymia describes the difficulty in recognizing one's own emotions. But is blindness for ones own feelings also associated with deficits in recognizing the affective states of other people? And is this also reflected at the neural level? These questions were investigated by Philipp Kanske and Sophie Gosch together with other scientists from Leipzig and Mainz. On a behavioral level, there was no association between alexithymia and performance in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which measures the recognition of affective states. However, at the neural level, an association of alexithymia with the activity of brain regions involved in visual processing was detected. This could indicate that people with higher levels of alexithymia are more dependent on visual cues when recognizing affective states. Understanding such mechanisms may contribute to more targeted interventions in the long term.

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