Neuroimaging study of alexithymia and emotional recognition ‐ from the perspective of social neuroscience

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  • Moriguchi Yoshiya
    Clinical Pathophysiology, Department of Psychophysiology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psyhciatry

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  • アレキシサイミアと感情認知の脳機能画像解析 - 社会性の観点から
  • アレキシサイミア ト カンジョウ ニンチ ノ ノウ キノウ ガゾウ カイセキ シャカイセイ ノ カンテン カラ

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Abstract

Alexithymia refers to difficulty in identifying and expressing emotion in self and is related to disturbedemotional regulation. Alexithymia was originally proposed as a personality trait which plays acentral role in psychosomatic diseases. Although neuroscientific studies on this alexithymia arerequisite, there has been no integrative reviews so far which overview the entire studies ofneuroimaging studies of alexithymia. Here we overviewed the literatures of neuroimaging studies onalexithymia, and found that people with alexithymia showed reduced neural responses to emotionalstimuli from external environment and reduced response to imagery in their limbic and paralimbicareas（amygdala, insula, anterior/posterior cingulate cortex）. In contrast, they showed enhancedneural response to stimuli or tasks which involve any ‘physical’ contexts like somatosensory andsensorimotor function in the insula and other somatosensory/sensorimotor areas. They havehampered neural activity when they are involved in social tasks in the medial prefrontal and insulacortex. Their blunted response to external emotional stimuli and oversensitive response tosensorimotor stimuli should result in exaggerated physical symptoms which some individuals withalexithymia express.

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