Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural mechanisms of attentional bias toward social concepts in alexithymia

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Shu-Hui Lee¹, Kuan-Te Lee², Yu-Ching Chen³; ¹National Tsing Hua University, ²National Chengchi University, ³National Taiwan University

Effective executive control in social stress situations is crucial for maintaining mental health, as inflexible coping strategies can harm well-being. Individual responses to social stressors vary, and traits such as alexithymia are risk factors that increase vulnerability to mental health challenges and social stress. However, the neural mechanisms underlying attentional biases toward unpleasant social information in alexithymia remain unclear. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study utilized a socio-emotional Stroop task with a 2 (social/nonsocial) × 2 (negative/neutral) factorial design to examine attentional biases toward social concepts in individuals with alexithymia. Twenty-four Taiwanese adults (aged 18–25, 12 females) completed the socio-emotional Stroop task and the Mandarin version of Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). We investigated the neural correlates of the social-by-emotion interaction and their association with TAS scores. Results revealed that the social-by-emotion interaction activated socio-emotional regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), amygdala (AMG), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ), as well as executive control areas such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Moreover, higher TAS scores were associated with reduced activation in the OFC and AMG, suggesting difficulties in processing social information. Overall, our findings suggest that disruptions in emotional and attentional systems may contribute to difficulties in allocating attention to unpleasant social information among individuals with alexithymia.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions