The Emotion Mapping Activity: Preliminary evaluation of a mindfulness-informed exercise to improve emotion labeling in alexithymic persons.

Alexithymia is a psychoemotional trait associated with many treatment-resistant psychological and social difficulties. Research suggests that these difficulties stem primarily from an inability to appropriately apply linguistic labels to emotional experiences and content. The present research introduces and preliminarily evaluates a novel mindfulness-informed exercise to improve emotion-labeling ability in alexithymic persons. Based in culturally universal patterns of somatic experience, the Emotion Mapping Activity (EMA) directs alexithymic persons to reflect on their internal, somatic experiences as a source of information for interpreting and labeling emotional experiences. In the present study, 67 alexithymic persons completed a series of emotion-labeling tasks either with or without assistance of the EMA. Results suggest that completion of the EMA may improve ability to label emotions that would be otherwise misinterpreted - without interfering with labeling that is already intact. Though further research is necessary, the present study suggests that the EMA may hold the potential to be incorporated into psychotherapy protocols as an exercise for improving emotion-labeling ability in alexithymic clients.