Alexithymia factors and memory performances for neutral and emotional words

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct, which includes difficulties in identifying and expressing feelings and an externally-oriented cognitive style. We investigated the effects of alexithymia and its subscales on recall and recognition rates for neutral, joy, disgust and anger words. We found that the alexithymia-factor difficulties identifying feelings was negatively associated with memory performance for emotion words whereas a positive association was found between the alexithymia factor externally-oriented cognitive style and recognition rates for all words (emotional and neutral). The deficit for difficulties identifying feelings was particularly strong for remember responses. Such a deficit in the ability to consciously recognize emotional concepts could be related to the observed difficulties in regulating intense feelings found in high alexithymia scorers.