Evaluación neuropsicológica de la alexitimia y del procesamiento emocional en pacientes oncológicos

Abstract

The aim of the study is to go deeply into the neuropsychological evaluation of the emotional processing in cancer patients using for it two tests; an emotional Stroop and a recognition task of emotional words in a bilateral presentation in a visual divided field task . Both tasks use emotional (cancer related) and neutral words. The experimental group is composed by 19 oncological patients of the Hospital La Zarzuela; the control group for 21 students of the Psychology Faculty of Complutense University of Madrid. The results do not show significant differences between both groups in Alexythimia’s degree. Neither we find differences in latency of response in emotional and neutral words in the emotional Stroop task. As for the recognition task of words in bilateral presentation of divided field, we find that the number of emotional words recognized is significantly more than the number of neutral in both groups. The experimental group uses the right hemisphere in more measurement that the control group. There happens the hypothesis of the better efficiency in the recognition and processing word (independently of the affective valence) on the left hemisphere. We confirm for the experimental group, the hypothesis of theadvantage of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotional words.