Specific brain processing of facial expressions in people with alexithymia: an H215O‐PET study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexithymia is a personal trait characterized by a reduced ability to identify and describe one's own feelings and is known to contribute to a variety of physical and behavioural disorders. To elucidate the pathogenesis of stress-related disorders and the normal functions of emotion, it is important to investigate the neurobiology of alexithymia. Although several neurological models of alexithymia have been proposed, there is very little direct evidence for the neural correlates of alexithymia. Using PET, we studied brain activity in subjects with alexithymia when viewing a range of emotional face expressions. Twelve alexithymic and 12 non-alexithymic volunteers (all right-handed males) were selected from 247 applicants on the basis of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was measured with H(2)(15)O-PET while the subjects looked at angry, sad and happy faces with varying emotional intensity, as well as neutral faces. Brain response in the subjects with alexithymia significantly differed from that in the subjects without alexithymia. The alexithymics exhibited lower rCBF in the inferior and middle frontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, inferior parietal cortex and occipital cortex in the right hemisphere than the non-alexithymics. Additionally, the alexithymics showed higher rCBF in the superior frontal cortex, inferior parietal cortex and cerebellum in the left hemisphere when compared with the non-alexithymics. A covariance analysis revealed that rCBF in the inferior and superior frontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and parietal cortex in the right hemisphere correlated negatively with individual TAS-20 scores when viewing angry and sad facial expressions, and that no rCBF correlated positively with TAS-20 scores. Moreover, the anterior cingulate cortex and insula were less activated in the alexithymics' response to angry faces than their response to neutral faces. These results suggest that people with alexithymia process facial expressions differently from people without alexithymia, and that this difference may account for the disorder of affect regulation and consequent peculiar behaviour in people with alexithymia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".