The association between alexithymia and sociodemographic variables is not well understood. Previous studies using the current 20-item and previous 26-item versions of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) have shown inconsistent associations with age, sex, socioeconomic status, and years of education. We tested 380 subjects from the community stratified equally across sex, five age groups, and three socioeconomic classes. In addition to the TAS-20, we also administered the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a behavioral measure of the ability to be aware of and represent emotions in words, a core component of alexithymia. The TAS-20 and LEAS were each correlated with age, sex, socioeconomic status (SES), and years of education (P < .01) in the same direction and to approximately the same degree. Alexithymia (or low emotional awareness) is associated with older age, male sex, lower SES, and fewer years of education. The TAS-20 and LEAS are only slightly correlated (r = -.19, n = 380, P < .001), but their correlation is largely accounted for by their shared variance with these demographic variables. The convergence of findings with these two quite different measures and the nature of their overlap support the validity of these associations between alexithymia and sociodemographic variables.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Impaired verbal and nonverbal emotion recognition in alexithymia.

Although clinical observations suggest that alexithymic individuals have a deficit in their ability to recognize emotional stimuli and that this deficit is not simply due to a problem in verbal labeling, these two hypotheses have not been empirically confirmed. Three hundred eighty participants in a community survey without current or past histories of psychiatric disorder completed two independent measures of alexithymia [the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20)] and the Perception of Affect Task (PAT), a 140-item measure of the ability to match emotion stimuli. The PAT includes four subtasks that require the subject to match verbal or nonverbal emotion stimuli with verbal or nonverbal emotion responses. The subtasks include matching sentences and words (verbal-verbal), faces and words (nonverbal-verbal), sentences and faces (verbal-nonverbal), and faces and photographs of scenes (nonverbal-nonverbal). Across the entire sample, higher (alexithymic) TAS-20 and lower LEAS scores were both correlated with lower accuracy rates on each of the subtasks of the PAT (p < .001), accounting for 10.5% and 18.4% of the variance, respectively. Fifty-one subjects met TAS-20 criteria for alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals scored lower than other subjects on purely nonverbal matching, purely verbal matching, and mixed verbal-nonverbal matching (all p < .001). These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired verbal and nonverbal recognition of emotion stimuli and that the hallmark of alexithymia, a difficulty in putting emotion into words, may be a marker of a more general impairment in the capacity for emotion information processing.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Pervasive emotion recognition deficit common to alexithymia and the repressive coping style.

OBJECTIVE: Previous research has demonstrated a deficit in the ability to recognize emotions in alexithymic individuals. The repressive coping style is thought to preferentially impair the detection of unpleasant compared with pleasant emotions, and the degree of deficit is typically thought to be less severe than in alexithymia. We compared emotion recognition ability in both individuals with alexithymia and those with the repressive coping style. METHODS: Three hundred seventy-nine subjects completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale, the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (a measure of repressive defensiveness), the Bendig Short Form of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Perception of Affect Task. The Perception of Affect Task consists of four 35-item emotion recognition subtasks: matching sentences and words, faces and words, sentences and faces, and faces and photographs of scenes. The stimuli in each subtask consist of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and neutral) depicted five times each. Recognition accuracy results were collapsed across subtasks within each emotion category. RESULTS: Highly alexithymic subjects (for all, p<.01) and those with low emotional awareness (for all, p<.001) were consistently less accurate in emotion recognition in all seven categories. Highly defensive subjects (including repressors) were less accurate in the detection of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness (for all, p<.05). Furthermore, scores on the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale accounted for significantly more variance in performance on the Perception of Affect Task than scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (p<.01). CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that alexithymia and the repressive coping style are each associated with impairments in the recognition of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions and that the two styles of emotional self-regulation differ more in the magnitude than in the quality of these impairments.

Adaptation, Psychological↗