Do I experience anxiety, anger, and happiness in the same way as you do? A relational approach to emotion qualia across levels of alexithymia

Do people experience emotions in the same way? How can we characterize the sameness of emotional quality? Qualitative aspects of emotional experience are usually communicated through words. However, words can be ambiguous and can mean different things to different people. Here, we introduce a relational approach, which minimizes the reliance on language yet characterizes emotional experiences as structure, based on similarity judgments among emotion-evoking videos. This Registered Report will apply this method to characterize a psychological condition of “alexithymia,” which is described as “no words for emotions”. In two experiments, participants will rate the similarity between successive videos, based on the feelings evoked by the videos. Repeated video pairs will measure the degree of consistency in their similarity judgments. We will test whether individuals scoring high and low in alexithymia differ in the structure and consistency of their judgments. To disentangle the structures driven by sensory, rather than emotional, aspects of the videos, we will run a control experiment where participants rate the similarity of videos, ignoring the evoked emotions. A pilot study (N = 679) supports the feasibility of this design. By bypassing verbal reports, our approach can inform the study of emotional experience and help to clarify the nature of alexithymia.