• Francisco Pedrosa Gil, Nathan Ridout, Henrik Kessler, Michaela Neuffer, Claudia Schoechlin, Harald C Traue, and Marius Nickel.
• Psychosomatic Out-patient Clinic, Department of Medicine Innenstadt, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Pettenkoferstrasse 10, Munich, Germany. Francisco.Pedrosa.Gil@med.uni-muenchen.de
• Depress Anxiety. 2009 Jan 1;26(1):E26-33.

ObjectiveThe primary aim of this study was to investigate facial emotion recognition in patients with somatoform disorders (SFD). Also of interest was the extent to which concurrent alexithymia contributed to any changes in emotion recognition accuracy.MethodsTwenty patients with SFD and twenty healthy, age, sex and education matched, controls were assessed with the Facially Expressed Emotion Labelling Test of facial emotion recognition and the 26-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-26).ResultsPatients with SFD exhibited elevated alexithymia symptoms relative to healthy controls. Patients with SFD also recognized significantly fewer emotional expressions than did the healthy controls. However, the group difference in emotion recognition accuracy became nonsignificant once the influence of alexithymia was controlled for statistically.ConclusionsThis suggests that the deficit in facial emotion recognition observed in the patients with SFD was most likely a consequence of concurrent alexithymia. Impaired facial emotion recognition observed in the patients with SFD could plausibly have a negative influence on these individuals' social functioning.(c) 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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