The dimensional construct of alexithymia consist of four facets: (1) difficulty in identifying feelings and distinguishing between emotional feelings and the physical sensations of emotional arousal, (2) difficulty in finding words to describe feelings to other persons, (3) limited imaginative processes, and (4) an external oriented thinking style ( Bagby et al., 2020). Despite existing deficits in the facial mimicry of alexithymic persons, affect-expressive faces of children seem to trigger a stronger positive emotional involvement even in the AG. The affect-expressive faces of children induced enhanced zygomatic and reduced corrugator muscle activity in both groups. The participants of AG showed a decreased fEMG activity in response to the presented faces of adults compared to the CG but not for the faces of children. There was one significant main effect for the factor emotion and four interaction effects for the factors group × age, muscle × age, muscle × emotion, and for the triple interaction muscle × age × emotion. Differences in fEMG response (4000 ms) were tested in a variance analytical model. The responses of the groups were measured by facial electromyographic activity (fEMG) of corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major muscles. The videos started with a neutral face and reached maximum affect expression within 2 s. Facial mimicry was induced by presentation of naturalistic affect-expressive video sequences (fear, sadness, disgust, anger, and joy) taken from validated sets of faces from adults (Averaged Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces) and children (Picture-Set of Young Children’s Affective Facial Expressions). From 3503 initial data sets, two groups of 38 high and low alexithymic individuals without relevant mental or physical diseases were matched regarding age, gender, and education. A multi-method approach (20-point Toronto Alexithymia Scale and Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia) was used for assessing levels of alexithymia. In this study it was tested experimentally whether facial mimicry of the alexithymic group (AG) is different from the control group (CG) in response to dynamic facial affect expressions of children and adults. ![]() There is evidence that the baby schema may influence this process. Alexithymia is associated with a reduced facial mimicry ability to affect expressions of adults. Medical Faculty, Clinical Institute for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of the Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germanyįacial mimicry is the automatic tendency to imitate facial expressions of emotions.Nordmann *, Ralf Schäfer, Tobias Müller and Matthias Franz
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