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- Title
Recognizing and Looking at Masked Emotional Faces in Alexithymia.
- Authors
Fuchs, Marla; Kersting, Anette; Suslow, Thomas; Bodenschatz, Charlott Maria
- Abstract
Alexithymia is a clinically relevant personality construct characterized by difficulties identifying and communicating one's emotions and externally oriented thinking. Alexithymia has been found to be related to poor emotion decoding and diminished attention to the eyes. The present eye tracking study investigated whether high levels of alexithymia are related to impairments in recognizing emotions in masked faces and reduced attentional preference for the eyes. An emotion recognition task with happy, fearful, disgusted, and neutral faces with face masks was administered to high-alexithymic and non-alexithymic individuals. Hit rates, latencies of correct responses, and fixation duration on eyes and face mask were analyzed as a function of group and sex. Alexithymia had no effects on accuracy and speed of emotion recognition. However, alexithymic men showed less attentional preference for the eyes relative to the mask than non-alexithymic men, which was due to their increased attention to face masks. No fixation duration differences were observed between alexithymic and non-alexithymic women. Our data indicate that high levels of alexithymia might not have adverse effects on the efficiency of emotion recognition from faces wearing masks. Future research on gaze behavior during facial emotion recognition in high alexithymia should consider sex as a moderating variable.
- Subjects
ALEXITHYMIA; EMOTION recognition; GAZE; EYE tracking; MEDICAL masks; FACIAL expression &; emotions (Psychology)
- Publication
Behavioral Sciences (2076-328X), 2024, Vol 14, Issue 4, p343
- ISSN
2076-328X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/bs14040343