Anxiety statistically mediates the association between stress and difficulty identifying feelings while depression shows no effect: a cross-sectional study in college students

Abstract

Emotion recognition (ER) refers to the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in identifying emotional expressions in others, whereas alexithymia reflects difficulties in identifying and describing one's own emotions. Mood and anxiety symptoms, as well as exposure to stress, have been associated with alterations in emotional processing. This study examined the associations between stress levels, self-emotion processing (alexithymia), and recognition of others' facial expressions in a non-clinical student sample. Methods One hundred twenty-four college students completed questionnaires assessing stress, anxiety (BAI), depression (BDI), and alexithymia (TAS-20). Stress typology measurements included Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Chronic Stress Scale (CSS). The Emotion Recognition (ER-40) task of PennCNB assessed the ability to recognize angry, fearful, sad, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Findings ER-40 performance was not significantly correlated with stress measures or psychopathology scores, except for the negative correlation of recognition of fear expressions with TAS-20 scores. The relatively high accuracy levels and limited variability observed in task performance may have reduced sensitivity to detect subtle associations, suggesting the possibility of ceiling effects. In contrast, all stress and psychopathology measures were positively correlated with alexithymia scores (BAI: p