Résumé
Objective: Alexithymics have difficulty in identifying and describing feelings to other people. The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of affective priming effects of alexithymics and examine their deficit of emotional automatic processing. Method: 23 alexithymics and 23 non-alexithymics were screened out in university students, they were required to judge whether the target pictures were positive or negative as soon as possible while prime pictures were supraliminally or subliminally presented. The correct rates and the mean response latencies were subjected to ANOVA with repeated measures. Result:In both supraliminal and subliminal affective priming tasks, the mean response latencies were significantly longer for affectively incongruent trials, as compared to those for affectively congruent and control trials. The correct rates for affectively incongruent trials were the lowest.Subjects were relatively slower to respond to positive target pictures than to negative target pictures(96.9%/95.3%,97.6%/95.8%).In subliminal affective priming task, there were no differences of correct rates and latencies between alexithymics and nonalexithymics. In supraliminal priming task, the latency of alexithymics was longer than that of nonalexithymics (536.3ms/496.4ms). Conclusion: Alexithymics have deficit in automatic processing for emotional information they are aware of, but not for those can not be aware.