Objective: Alexithymics have difficulty in identifying and describing feelings to other people. The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of affective priming effects of alexithymics and examine their deficit of emotional automatic processing. Method: 23 alexithymics and 23 non-alexithymics were screened out in university students, they were required to judge whether the target pictures were positive or negative as soon as possible while prime pictures were supraliminally or subliminally presented. The correct rates and the mean response latencies were subjected to ANOVA with repeated measures. Result:In both supraliminal and subliminal affective priming tasks, the mean response latencies were significantly longer for affectively incongruent trials, as compared to those for affectively congruent and control trials. The correct rates for affectively incongruent trials were the lowest.Subjects were relatively slower to respond to positive target pictures than to negative target pictures(96.9%/95.3%,97.6%/95.8%).In subliminal affective priming task, there were no differences of correct rates and latencies between alexithymics and nonalexithymics. In supraliminal priming task, the latency of alexithymics was longer than that of nonalexithymics (536.3ms/496.4ms). Conclusion: Alexithymics have deficit in automatic processing for emotional information they are aware of, but not for those can not be aware.

Objective To examine the characteristics of affective intensity and cognitive emotion regulation in subjects with borderline personality disorder ( BPD) . Methods The BPD subscale of personal-ity disorder questionnaire( PDQ-4+) was used to assess the BPD symptoms,the short affective intensity scale (SAIS) and cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ) were used to measure affect intensity and cognitive emotion regulation strategy,respectively. 765 subjects with BPD and 776 healthy controls were se-lected. The independent-samples t test was used to analyze the differences between BPD group and controls and logistic regression analysis was used to examine the related factors affecting the BPD. Results Com-pared with the control group(negative intensity:(3.08±0.66),negative coping dimension:(37.20±5.94), BPD group got higher scores in negative intensity((3.88±0.74), t=22.29, P<0.01,Cohen''s d>0.8)and negative coping dimension((44.77±6.36), t=24.16, P<0.01,Cohen''s d>0.8). The logistic regression anal-ysis showed that negative intensity(B=1.38,Exp(B)=3.97,95%CI for EXP(B):3.15~5.00, P<0.01) and negative cognitive regulations strategy(B=0.19,Exp(B)=1.21,95% CI:1.18-1.25, P<0.01) could affect the prevalence of BPD. Conclusion Subjects with BPD traits have more significant negative affective inten-sity and tend to use negative cognitive regulations strategy.

Objective To study the difference of attentional bias towards general negative words between non-mediated obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients and healthy controls.Methods Event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from 26 non-mediated OCD patients and 24 normal controls while they performed an emotional Stroop task.Results Compared to healthy controls,OCD patients showed significantly longer reaction time (OCD:(467 ± 14.88) ms,Controls:(409.65 ± 15.49) ms,P＜ 0.01),and had significantly larger P2 and P3 amplitude to all three types of words (P2 amplitude:OCD:(10.41±0.49) μV,Controls:(8.89±0.48) μV,P＜0.05;P3 amplitude:(10.04±0.68) μV,Controls:(7.68±0.67) μV,P＜0.05).In addition,the P2 peak latency of the frontal area in OCD patients was significantly longer than that in healthy controls(OCD:(190.09±4.71) ms,Controls:(179.60±4.72) ms,P＜0.05).Conclusion Current findings suggest that OCD patients are characterized by a general attentional inhibition deficit but not an attentional bias to the negative words.