title: The effect of alexithymia on early visual processing of emotional body postures.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy; CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Viale Europa 980, 47521 Cesena, Italy. Electronic address: khatereh.borhani3@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Khatereh
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Borhani
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy; CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Viale Europa 980, 47521 Cesena, Italy. Electronic address: sara.borgomaneri2@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Borgomaneri
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy; CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Viale Europa 980, 47521 Cesena, Italy. Electronic address: elisabetta.ladavas@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Elisabetta
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Làdavas
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40127 Bologna, Italy; CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bologna, Viale Europa 980, 47521 Cesena, Italy. Electronic address: caterina.bertini@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bertini
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000502:physiology*; D011187:Posture; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Alexithymia; Early posterior negativity (EPN); Emotional bodies; N190; Visual structural encoding