title: The sound of feelings: electrophysiological responses to emotional speech in alexithymia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in the cognitive processing of emotions (cognitive dimension) and in the experience of emotions (affective dimension). Previous research focused mainly on visual emotional processing in the cognitive alexithymia dimension. We investigated the impact of both alexithymia dimensions on electrophysiological responses to emotional speech in 60 female subjects.
  
  
  METHODS
  During unattended processing, subjects watched a movie while an emotional prosody oddball paradigm was presented in the background. During attended processing, subjects detected deviants in emotional prosody. The cognitive alexithymia dimension was associated with a left-hemisphere bias during early stages of unattended emotional speech processing, and with generally reduced amplitudes of the late P3 component during attended processing. In contrast, the affective dimension did not modulate unattended emotional prosody perception, but was associated with reduced P3 amplitudes during attended processing particularly to emotional prosody spoken in high intensity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results provide evidence for a dissociable impact of the two alexithymia dimensions on electrophysiological responses during the attended and unattended processing of emotional prosody. The observed electrophysiological modulations are indicative of a reduced sensitivity to the emotional qualities of speech, which may be a contributing factor to problems in interpersonal communication associated with alexithymia.
authors.affiliation: Neuroimaging Center, Department of Neuroscience, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. K.Goerlich@med.umcg.nl
authors.forename: Katharina Sophia
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Goerlich
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aleman
authors.forename: Sander
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Martens
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D001519:Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D055724:Electrophysiological Phenomena; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult