Research Information System
Journal of Clinical Psychology Research, vol.10, no.1, pp.86-104, 2026 (Scopus, TRDizin)
Studies on emotional processes reveal that people exhibit attention and memory biases toward emotional stimuli that align with their emotions. However, researchers have not analyzed whether the mood congruency effect persists in individuals with high levels of alexi-thymia. This study aimed to examine whether there is a consistency-based bias in facial emotion recognition among individuals with varying levels of empathy and alexithymia. In the first phase of the study, 247 participants aged 18 to 55 completed the Demographic Information Form, Empathy Scale, and 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale. The sample for the second phase, which included the experimental component, consisted of 141 participants aged 18 to 30 who also participated in the first phase after applying the exclusion criteria. Researchers conducted final analyses on 105 participants. In the second phase, participants were categorized into ‘low’ and ‘high’ alexithymia groups, as measured using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Then, researchers formed ‘low’ and ‘high’ empathy groups based on the Empathy Scale within each alexithymia group. Subsequently, the participants in these four groups were randomly assigned to one of the sadness, happiness, or control conditions, and emotion induction was implemented. Emotion induction was controlled using the Positive and Negative Affect Scale. Finally, participants under different mood conditions completed the Facial Emotion Recognition task that required them to detect emotional expressions on a series of faces. The correct detection rates of emotions were analyzed separately for happiness, sadness, and others. Analyses revealed that individuals under different emotion inductions and/or with varying levels of empathy and alexithymia did not exhibit biases toward stimuli that aligned with emotion induction and did not show variations based on positive, negative, and general facial emotion recognition performance. The current study can guide clinical applications and research conducted on emotions in individuals with elevated levels of alexithymia.