No Evidence of Perceptual Pseudoneglect in Alexithymia

The research in neuroscience links alexithymia, the difficulty of identifying and describing feelings and emotions, with a left hemisphere preference and/or a right hemisphere deficit. To provide a neuropsychological support to this finding, we explored the relationship between alexithymia and the performance in a line bisection task, a standard method to evaluate spatial attention in relation with the functioning of the right hemisphere. 222 healthy participants completed a version of the TAS-20 scale, which measures alexithymia, and were asked to mark (bisect) the center of a 10 cm horizontal segment. The results document a significant rightward shift of the line center in borderline and manifest alexithymic participants, as compared to non-alexithymic individuals. Moreover, the higher the TAS-20 score the greater the rightward shift in the line bisection task. This result supports the right-hemisphere deficit hypothesis in alexithymia and suggests that visuospatial abnormalities may be an inner component of their profile.