Emotional Memory Impairment In Alexithymia

Objective Emotional memory refers to emotion can impact the memory processing stages such as encoding, consolidation and retrieval. The emotion congnition modulation proposes that the prefrontal cortex in emotion regulation plays an important role. Study found that the main function of the prefrontal cortex in the cognitive experience of the rules of the process to extract the relevant information, thus thinking and behavior from its control and regulation. Imaging studies have demonstrated frontal lobe is the neural basis of alexithymia one。In this study, by taking neuropsychological tests, aims to investigate(1)whether emotional memory is damaged in alexithymia and also to examine on the positive, neutral, negative differences in emotional memory;(2)Alexithymia and the normal control group comparative analysis of emotional memory, trying to explore the neural mechanisms of alexithymia, as the frontal lobe as one of the common neural basis of providing indirect evidence.Methods Establishment of emotional memory neuropsychological test methods, thirty alexithymia and thirty healty subjects were given the emotional memory test such as rating the pictures, recall and recognition. To compare the two groups on the positive, negative, neutral differences in emotional memories.Results There was no significant difference between alexithymia and control subjects in rating the negative, netural and positive pictures (P>0.05); Alexithymia had worse recall for both negative and positive scenes than control subjects at the 10 min and 72 hour tests (P>0.05); memories of the correct rate and negative pictures after 72h recognition accuracy differences were statistically significant (P <0.05). Conclusion Alexithymia have a general impairment of emotional memory , but the emotional valence ratings picture is no different. Therefore, this study explored the alexithymia and emotional memory mechanism, indirectly support the frontal lobe may be one of the common neural basis.