Transition from school to university can cause concern for many students. One issue is the gap between students' prior expectations and the realities of university life, which can cause significant distress, poor academic performance and increased drop-out rates if not managed effectively. Research has shown several similarities in the expectations of staff and students in regards to which factors determine academic success, but there is also evidence of dissonance. For example, staff consider independent study and critical evaluation as key factors, whereas students view feedback on drafts of work and support from staff as being most important. The aim of the current study was to determine what expectations students hold when starting university education, and what expectations university lecturers have of students entering university. Lecturers (n = 20) and first year students (n = 77) completed a series of questionnaires concerning their expectations of learning in HE (staff and students) and their approach to teaching (staff). Results revealed that students have largely realistic expectations of university. For example, the majority expected to be in charge of their own study. Some unrealistic expectations were also evident, e.g., most expected that teaching would be the same at university as it had been at school. The expectation that lecturers would provide detailed notes varied as a function of student age. Lecturers reported modifying their expectations of students and adapting their teaching approach according to year of study. Information-transmission/teacher-focused style was more common when teaching 1st year students; a more concept-changing/student-focused approach tended to be used when teaching 2nd year students (and above). Lecturer's expectations of student engagement did not differ according to year. Less experienced lecturers reported more negative expectations of student engagement than did experienced lecturers. In line with previous work, we observed overlap in expectations of staff and students, but some clear differences too.

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct characterised by difficulties identifying one’s feelings and distinguishing them from bodily sensations, difficulties describing one’s feelings to others, and an externally oriented cognitive style. Over the past 25 years, a burgeoning body of research has examined how alexithymia moderates processing at the cognition–emotion interface. We review the findings in five domains: attention, appraisals, memory, language, and behaviours. The preponderance of studies linked alexithymia with deficits in emotion processing, which was apparent across all domains, except behaviours. All studies on behaviours and a proportion of studies in other domains demonstrated emotional over-responding. Analysis at the facet level revealed deficits in memory and language that are primarily associated with externally oriented thinking, while over-responding was most often linked to difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings. The review also found evidence for contextual modulation: The pattern of deficits and over-responding was not restricted to emotional contexts but also occurred in neutral contexts, and in some circumstances, emotional over-responding in alexithymia was beneficial. Taken together, this review highlights alexithymia as a central personality dimension in the interplay between cognition and emotion.

Sixteen clinically depressed patients and sixteen healthy controls were presented with a set of emotional facial expressions and were asked to identify the emotion portrayed by each face. They, were subsequently given a recognition memory test for these faces. There was no difference between the groups in terms of their ability to identify emotion between from faces. All participants identified emotional expressions more accurately than neutral expressions, with happy expressions being identified most accurately. During the recognition memory phase the depressed patients demonstrated superior memory for sad expressions, and inferior memory for happy expressions, relative to neutral expressions. Conversely, the controls demonstrated superior memory for happy expressions, and inferior memory for sad expressions, relative to neutral expressions. These results are discussed in terms of the cognitive model of depression proposed by Williams, Watts, MacLeod, and Mathews (1997).

This special issue brings together two important reviews and seven cutting-edge empirical papers concerning the influence of alexithymia on cognitive and emotional processing. Alexithymia is a multifaceted construct that is characterised by difficulties identifying one’s feelings; difficulties describing one’s feelings to others; and an externally focused, utilitarian cognitive style. In this paper, we begin by considering how emotion science has evolved in its understanding of personality traits, before highlighting the potential importance of alexithymia research for the field of cognition and emotion. After summarising the historical context of alexithymia research, we consider the contributions of the featured papers to the literature of cognition and emotion. The collected works highlight that alexithymia influences several aspects of how one perceives and responds to neutral and emotional situations, by impacting upon multiple processes (attention, appraisals, memory, language and behaviour), showing the importance of drawing better connections amongst multiple processes, toward disentangling the effects of early processes on later ones. A lack of correspondence between processes, as well as amongst alexithymia facets, is another central finding of the special issue. This pattern is thought to lead to ineffective and inflexible emotion regulation and to pose significant risks for physical and mental illness.

Objective: The primary aim of this study was to investigate facial emotion recognition in patients with somatoform disorders (SFD). Also of interest was the extent to which concurrent alexithymia contributed to any changes in emotion recognition accuracy. Methods: Twenty patients with SFD and twenty healthy, age, sex and education matched, controls were assessed with the Facially Expressed Emotion Labelling Test of facial emotion recognition and the 26-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-26). Results: Patients with SFD exhibited elevated alexithymia symptoms relative to healthy controls. Patients with SFD also recognized significantly fewer emotional expressions than did the healthy controls. However, the group difference in emotion recognition accuracy became nonsignificant once the influence of alexithymia was controlled for statistically. Conclusions: This suggests that the deficit in facial emotion recognition observed in the patients with SFD was most likely a consequence of concurrent alexithymia. Impaired facial emotion recognition observed in the patients with SFD could plausibly have a negative influence on these individuals' social functioning. Depression and Anxiety, 2009.