Do I experience happiness in the same way as you do? A relational approach to characterize emotional experience

Do I experience happiness in the same way as you do? A relational approach to characterize emotional experience Submitted as Stage 1 Registered Report Lipeng Lin, Chuyin Zhang, Naotsugu Tsuchiya 1. Background Do people with higher alexithymia experience emotions differently, or just have difficulty expressing them? •Alexithymia = ”no words for emotions”. •Difficulty articulating emotional experiences. •Key debate: Altered experiences vs. Altered expressivity? Characterize pre-verbal emotional experiences. •Relational approach [1]: Characterizes evoked emotional experiences as relational structure through similarity judgments rather than verbal descriptions. •Compare emotional experience structures across alexithymia levels. 2. Method 3. Hypotheses Stimuli: 75 emotion evocative videos from [2]. Task: Similarity ratings between emotion evocative video pairs, with double-pass design (rate same video pairs twice). Assessment: Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire [3]. 4. Pilot result Low alexithymia High alexithymia •N = 769 online participants. •People with high alexithymia seem to experience emotion similarly to low alexithymia individuals (BF₁₀ = 0.21), but show significantly less consistent similarity judgments (BF₁₀ > 10³). Mor different Low alexithymia (N= 383) High alexithymia (N= 386) V4 Main instruction Your task it to determine the similarity ofYOUR OWN FEELINGS BETWEEN the current video and the previous video V1 V2 V3 V4 H1: Different emotional experience •High alexithymia → altered similarity structures. •Prediction: Different similarity structures between high and low alexithymia groups. H2: Ambiguous emotional experience •High alexithymia → inconsistent similarity judgments for same video pairs. •Prediction: Lower double-pass consistency (correlation between first and second pass) for high alexithymia. Stage 1 Registered Report submitted. Upon acceptance: •We will replicate the study using a video set from [2] that is independent from the pilot study to test generalizability. •Control: Content-based similarity ratings (vs. emotion-based ratings) are predicted to show fewer group differences. References [1] Tsuchiya & Saigo 2021 Neurosci Conscious “A relational approach to consciousness” [2] Cowen & Keltner 2017 PNAS Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion [3] Vorst & Bermond 2001 Personality and Individual Differences Bermond–Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire Preprint Email: [email protected] Lab X: @conscious_tlab | Personal X: @LipengLin_