Brain Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Systems (BIS/BAS) and Hemispheric Dominance in People with and without Alexithymia

The present research was a causal-comparative study with ex post facto method to evaluate brain behavioral inhibition and activation systems (BIS/BAS) and hemispheric dominance in alexithymia. For this purpose, 25 university students without alexithymia symptoms and 25 university students with alexithymia were selected with purposive sampling among male and female undergraduate students of Bonab and Tabriz Payam-e- Noor Universities. In this study, data collection tools included Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Brain Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Systems (BIS/BAS) questionnaire of Carver and White (1994), and Edinburgh’s handedness questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and statistical software of SPSS-18. The results indicated that there is no difference between people with alexithymia and people without alexithymia in terms of hemispheric dominance. People with alexithymia had less behavioral inhibition and the drive mean in people with alexithymia was lower