Are Panic And Inability To Express Emotions Related?
Thursday, June 5, 2008 - 08:21
in Psychology & Sociology
Investigators have explored the inability to express emotions (alexithymia) in panic disorder in an article in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. In patients with panic disorder (PD), the difficulty to identify and manage emotional experience might contribute to the enduring vulnerability to panic attacks. Such a difficulty might reflect a dysfunction of fronto-temporo-limbic circuits. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that drug-free patients with PD, as compared with healthy subjects (HS), show a higher prevalence of alexithymia, greater difficulty in emotional stimuli processing and poorer performance on neuropsychological tests exploring the activity of fronto-temporo-limbic circuits.