Alexithymia and empathy predict changes in autonomic arousal during affective stimulation

Volodymyr B. Bogdanov, Olena V. Bogdanova, Dmytro S. Gorlov, Yuriy P. Gorgo, Joris J.J. Dirckx, Mykola Y. Makarchuk, Jean Schoenen, Hugo Critchley
Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology. 2013-09-01; 26(3): 121-132
DOI: 10.1097/WNN.0000000000000002

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Bogdanov VB(1), Bogdanova OV, Gorlov DS, Gorgo YP, Dirckx JJ, Makarchuk MY, Schoenen J, Critchley H.

Author information:
(1)*INRA, Nutrition et Neurobiologie Intégrée and University Bordeaux, Nutrition
et Neurobiologie Intégrée, UMR 1286, Bordeaux, France †Department of Human and
Animal Physiology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev, Kiev, Ukraine
‡Department of General Psychology, National Technical University, Kiev, Ukraine
§Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium ∥Department of
Neurology, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium ¶Department of Psychiatry,
Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex,
UK #Sussex Partnership National Health Service Foundation Trust, Sussex Education
Centre, Millview, Hove, UK.

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, the inability to describe one’s own emotions, is linked
to deficits in empathy, manifesting as a diminished capacity to recognize or
understand the emotions and mental states of others. Several brain centers of
autonomic control and interoception that are activated in empathy are thought to
misfunction in alexithymia. We hypothesized that individual differences in
autonomic changes under affective stimulation might be associated with
differences in alexithymia and empathy.
METHODS: We studied 21 healthy volunteers, comparing their alexithymia and
empathy scores with changes in their sympathetic autonomic arousal, indexed by
the palmar skin potential level, during 3 tasks: playing a computer game,
performing mental arithmetic, and watching a negative emotional valence video.
RESULTS: Both autonomic and subjective sense of arousal increased at the
beginning of each task and then gradually subsided over the course of the task.
Higher autonomic arousal at the onset of the computer game was associated with
higher empathy scores, and at the onset of the negative video with higher scores
for both empathy and alexithymia. Alexithymia delayed the habituation of
autonomic arousal during the computer game, while the empathy score was related
to a faster decline in arousal during the negative video task.
CONCLUSIONS: High alexithymia and high empathy scores were linked to increased
autonomic arousal at the onset of emotional stimulation, but were distinguishable
in the rates of habituation of the evoked arousal. Our data provide insight into
the relationships among interacting psychological traits, physiologic regulation,
and the arousal dimension of emotional experience.

 

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