The effect of alexithymia on early visual processing of emotional body postures

• Low (LA) and high (HA) alexithymic participants differ in modulating the N190.
• In LA participants, the N190 is modulated both by emotions and motion content.
• In HA participants, the N190 is modulated by motion, but not by emotions.
• In HA participants, fearful body postures fail to elicit the largest N190.
• HA and LA participants both show a fear related modulation of EPN.

Body postures convey emotion and motion-related information useful in social interactions. Early visual encoding of body postures, reflected by the N190 component, is modulated both by motion (i.e., postures implying motion elicit greater N190 amplitudes than static postures) and by emotion-related content (i.e., fearful postures elicit the largest N190 amplitude). At a later stage, there is a fear-related increase in attention, reflected by an early posterior negativity (EPN) (Borhani et al., 2015). Here, we tested whether difficulties in emotional processing (i.e., alexithymia) affect early and late visual processing of body postures. Low alexithymic participants showed emotional modulation of the N190, with fearful postures specifically enhancing N190 amplitude. In contrast, high alexithymic participants showed no emotional modulation of the N190. Both groups showed preserved encoding of the motion content. At a later stage, a fear-related modulation of the EPN was found for both groups, suggesting that selective attention to salient stimuli is the same in both low and high alexithymia.