ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Alexithymia and the Reduced Ability to Represent the Value of Aversively Motivated Actions.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Placebo and nocebo effects on pain through the lens of the predictive brain: Neurobiological mechanisms and translational implications.Experimental physiology · 2026Review
- The Role of Alexithymia in Social Learning and Feedback-Driven Social Inferences.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Lesion to the vmPFC abolishes intentionality (mis)attribution in the Knobe effect.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Body maps of sound pitch and relevant individual differences in alexithymic trait and depressive state.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Mental Imagery in the Relationship between Alexithymia and Parental Psychological Control.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Changes in brain rhythms and connectivity tracking fear acquisition and reversal.Brain structure & function · 2023Article
- Pavlovian threat learning shapes the kinematics of action.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Psychometric Properties and Configural Invariance of the Polish - Language Version of the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale in Non-clinical and Alcohol Addict Persons.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Aberrant reward prediction error during Pavlovian appetitive learning in alexithymia.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Alexithymia is a subclinical trait defined by difficulties in identifying and describing feelings and a cognitive style avoidant of introspection. Extensive literature shows that alexithymia is characterized by multifaceted impairments in processing emotional stimuli. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that may account for such impairments remain elusive. Here, we hypothesize that alexithymia may be understood as impairment in learning the emotional value of one's own actions and test this comparing performance of participants with high (HA) and low (LA) levels of alexithymia on a probabilistic selection task. Results show that, compared to LA, HA need more time to learn the value of individual stimuli and associated actions as difference in reinforcement rate between stimuli decreases. In addition, HA appear less able to generalize the value of previously learned actions that lead to a negative outcome, to make adaptive choices in a new context, requiring more time to avoid the most negative stimulus between two negative stimuli. Together, the results indicate that individuals with alexithymia show impaired learning of the value of aversively motivated actions. We argue that this impairment may hinder the construction of internal representations of emotional stimuli and actions and represent a mechanism that may account for the difficulties of alexithymia in processing emotional stimuli.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.