Do I experience anxiety, anger, and happiness in the same way as you do? A relational approach to emotion qualia across levels of alexithymia
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Do people experience emotions in the same way? How can we characterize the sameness of emotional quality? Qualitative aspects of emotional experience are usually communicated through words. However, words can be ambiguous and can mean different things to different people. Here, we introduce a relational approach that characterizes emotional experiences as structure based on similarity judgments among emotion-evoking videos. This registered report will apply this method to characterize a psychological condition of “alexithymia”, which is described as “no words for emotions”. Do people with alexithymia experience the same emotions with altered expressivity? Or do they not experience them to begin with? Our structural approach will determine if individuals with high and low alexithymia have the same emotional experiences. Our findings will open the door to the study of emotional experiences by offering a relational approach that bypasses verbal reports and will help to clarify the nature of alexithymia.
Authors: Lin Lipeng, Zhang Chuyin, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Institution: Monash University
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4410842969