Open AccessSkin Conductance as an Index of Alexithymic Traits in the General Population
Author(s) -
Lydia Hickman,
Connor Tom Keating,
Ambra Ferrari,
Jennifer Cook
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
psychological reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.645
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1558-691X
pISSN - 0033-2941
DOI - 10.1177/00332941211005118
Subject(s) - alexithymia , arousal , psychology , concordance , population , low arousal theory , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , generalizability theory , social psychology , demography , medicine , sociology
Alexithymia concerns a difficulty identifying and communicating one’s own emotions, and a tendency towards externally-oriented thinking. Recent work argues that such alexithymic traits are due to altered arousal response and poor subjective awareness of “objective” arousal responses. Although there are individual differences within the general population in identifying and describing emotions, extant research has focused on highly alexithymic individuals. Here we investigated whether mean arousal and concordance between subjective and objective arousal underpin individual differences in alexithymic traits in a general population sample. Participants rated subjective arousal responses to 60 images from the International Affective Picture System whilst their skin conductance was recorded. The Autism Quotient was employed to control for autistic traits in the general population. Analysis using linear models demonstrated that mean arousal significantly predicted Toronto Alexithymia Scale scores above and beyond autistic traits, but concordance scores did not. This indicates that, whilst objective arousal is a useful predictor in populations that are both above and below the cut-off values for alexithymia, concordance scores between objective and subjective arousal do not predict variation in alexithymic traits in the general population.