According to recent theories of emotion evaluative information is activated automatically in the associative network on the observation of a stimulus. This study investigates the relationship between alexithymic personality dimensions and automatic aective facilitation eects. The 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) was administered to 32 subjects along with two sequential wordΒ±word priming tasks (a pronunciation and an evaluation task). The TAS-20 scale Diculties Describing Feelings' showed a correlation with aective facilitation based on negative stimuli, whereas the scale Externally Oriented Thinking' as well as the TAS-20 sum score correlated with aective facilitation based on positive stimuli. Thus, some evidence was found that individuals with diculties verbalizing their emotions are especially sensitive to the negative valence of stimuli at a pre-attentive level. It is argued that the scale `Diculties Describing Feelings' might assess aspects of social anxiety or shame. Individuals who report a pragmatic and externally oriented cognitive style seem to be characterized by a heightened perceptual sensitivity for positive information. Methodological problems in measuring aective priming eects are discussed.