| Objective: Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality structure characterized by difficulties in emotion recognition and expression.Mentalization refers to the ability to intentionally infer other people’s mental state(including their intentions,beliefs and emotions)according to the surrounding clues.Previous studies have shown that alexithymia generally have mental impairment.However,at present,there are limited tools for directly measuring the mental ability of alexithymia,and there are few or no studies on the mental ability of alexithymia.In this study,the reliability and validity of the mentalization scale were tested.Secondly,college students with alexithymia were selected as the research object,using different polarity high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation(HD-t DCS)to investigate its regulatory effect on the mentalization of them,and then to analyze the mechanism of right inferior frontal gyrus(r IFG)in mentalization.Methods Study 1: The Chinese version of mentalization scale(Ment S)was used to evaluate 389 college students,and 114 of them were retest after 4 weeks.ECR-RS、IRI-C、EIS、TAS-20 were chosen as the criteria-related validity instrument.Study 2: 41 college students with alexithymia were selected and randomly divided into two groups.Before stimulation,all subjects completed the task of eye movement free viewing,Chinese version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test,Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test,Embedded False Belief test and the Chinese version of the Mentalization scale,and then received stimulation intervention twice a day for 20 minutes for five consecutive days,with an interval of at least 4 hours.At the end of the last stimulation on the fifth day,the previous task was completed again,and the effects of HD-t DCS on the intellectual ability of the subjects were compared between the two groups.Results Study 1: the Cronbach consistency coefficient of the revised Chinese version of the Mentalization scale is 0.837,and the test-retest reliability is 0.793;there is a significant correlation between the scale and the scores of the ECR-RS,IRI-C and TAS-20,which indicates that the mental scale has good reliability and validity.Study 2: Before stimulation,there was no significant difference in each task between the positive stimulation group and the sham stimulation group(P > 0.05).After stimulation:(1)In the eye movement free viewing paradigm,positive stimulation significantly increased the fixation time,fixation count and first fixation time of the eye area on happy and neutral faces of alexithymia college students(P < 0.05),but the promotion effect on the mouth area did not reach statistical difference(P > 0.05),and no significant changes in the eye and mouth area of interest were observed on sad faces(P>0.05)。(2)In the Chinese version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test paradigm,the positive stimulation group had a significant improvement in the emotional empathy score task(P = 0.001),but no significant improvement in the cognitive empathy(correct rate)(P > 0.05),and the sham stimulation group had no statistical significance in the emotional empathy and cognitive empathy task before and after.(3)In the Embedded False Belief test,there was no significant difference between the sham stimulation group and the anode stimulation group before and after stimulation(P > 0.05).(4)In the Chinese version of Mentalization scale,the total score of anode stimulation group was significantly higher(P = 0.03).Conclusion:(1)the reliability and validity of the revised Chinese version of the mentalization scale are good.(2)Right IFG plays an important role in mentalization ability.HD-t DCS can improve mental ability of alexithymia college students. |
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