Question: What are people lacking when they have a condition called Alexithymia, which leads to unempathic and ineffective emotional responses?

Context articles: Empathy
Amygdala hijack
Unipolar emotions
Art and emotion
Emotionality
Replicant
Cognitive humor processing
Alexithymia
Emospark
Eleutheromania

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position.
 There are many definitions for empathy that encompass a broad range of emotional states. Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathy.
Amygdala hijack is a term coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ".
 Drawing on the work of Joseph E. LeDoux, Goleman uses the term to describe emotional responses from people which are immediate and overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat.
Unipolar emotions refer to emotional responses to things that are either entirely positive or entirely negative.
 These emotional reactions become distinguished over time, causing the good things (like the "good old times") to be remembered better than they were, and the bad things recalled even worse than they might have been.
In psychology of art, the relationship between art and emotion has newly been the subject of extensive study thanks to the intervention of esteemed art historian Alexander Nemerov.
 Emotional or aesthetic responses to art have previously been viewed as basic stimulus response, but new theories and research have suggested that these experiences are more complex and able to be studied experimentally.
 Emotional responses are often regarded as the keystone to experiencing art, and the creation of an emotional experience has been argued as the purpose of artistic expression.
 Research has shown that the neurological underpinnings of perceiving art differ from those used in standard object recognition.
 Instead, brain regions involved in the experience of emotion and goal setting show activation when viewing art.
Emotionality is the observable behavioral and physiological component of emotion.
 It is a measure of a person's emotional reactivity to a stimulus.
 Most of these responses can be observed by other people, while some emotional responses can only be observed by the person experiencing them.
 Observable responses to emotion (i.e., smiling) do not have a single meaning.
 A smile can be used to express happiness or anxiety, a frown can communicate sadness or anger, and so on.
 Emotionality is often used by psychology researchers to operationalize emotion in research studies.
A replicant is a fictional bioengineered or biorobotic android in the 1982 film "Blade Runner" and its upcoming sequel "Blade Runner 2049".
 The Nexus series of replicants are virtually identical to an adult human, but have superior strength, speed, agility, resilience, and intelligence to varying degrees, depending on the model.
 Because of their similarity to humans, a replicant can only be detected by means of the fictional Voight-Kampff test, in which emotional responses are provoked; replicants' responses differ from humans' responses.
 Nexus 6 replicants also have a safety mechanism, namely a four-year lifespan, to prevent them from developing empathic cognition and therefore immunity to a Voight-Kampff machine.
 A derogatory term for a replicant is "skin-job".
Cognitive humor processing refers to the neural circuitry and pathways that are involved in detecting incongruities of various situations presented in a humorous manner.
 Over the past decade, many studies have emerged utilizing fMRI studies to describe the neural correlates associated with how a human processes something that is considered "funny".
 Conceptually, humor is subdivided into two elements: cognitive and affective.
 The cognitive element, known as humor detection, refers to understanding the joke.
 Usually, this is characterized by the perceiver attempting to comprehend the disparities between the punch line and prior experience.
 The affective element, otherwise known as humor appreciation, is involved with enjoying the joke and producing visceral, emotional responses depending on the hilarity of the joke.
 This ability to comprehend and appreciate humor is a vital aspect of social functioning and is a significant part of the human condition that is relevant from a very early age.
 Humor comprehension develops in parallel with growing cognitive and language skills during childhood, while its content is mostly influenced by social and cultural factors.
 A further approach is described which refers to humor as an attitude related to strains.
 Humorous responses when confronted with troubles are discussed as a skill often associated with high social competence.
 The concept of humor has also been shown to have therapeutic effects, improving physiological systems such as the immune and central nervous system.
 It also has been shown to help cope with stress and pain.
 In sum, humor proves to be a personal resource throughout the life span, and helps support the coping of everyday tasks.
Alexithymia is a personality construct characterized by the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self.
 The core characteristics of alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating.
 Furthermore, people with alexithymia have difficulty in distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to unempathic and ineffective emotional responding.
 Alexithymia occurs in approximately 10% of the population and can occur with a number of psychiatric conditions.
EmoSPARK is an artificial intelligence console created in London, United Kingdom by Patrick Levy-Rosenthal.
 The device uses facial recognition and language analysis to evaluate human emotion and convey responsive content according to the emotion.
 The console measures 90 mm x 90 mm x 90 mm and is cube shaped.
 It operates on an "Emotional Processing Unit", a microchip developed by Emoshape Inc. that enables the system to create emotional profile graphs of its surroundings.
 The emotional processing unit is a patent pending technology that is said to create synthesised emotional responses in machines.
 EmoSPARK was funded through an Indiegogo campaign which aimed to raise $200,000.
Eleutheromania, eleutherophilia or eleuthromania is "a mania or frantic zeal for freedom".
 Some usages of the term make it sound like it could be used in a medical context with a hint of an irrational disorder, such as John G Robertson's definition that described it as a "mad zeal or irresistible craving for freedom".
 However other usages assign to the term normal human emotional responses such as a mere passion for liberty.
 Individuals with this condition are called eleutheromaniacs.
 An antonym for the term is eleutherophobia.
 An individual that fears freedom is an eleutherophobe.