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Alexithymia and emotional regulation: A cluster analytical approach
Jie Chen
0
Ting Xu
0
Jin Jing
Raymond CK Chan
0
0
Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
,
Beijing
,
PR China
Background: Alexithymia has been a familiar conception of psychosomatic phenomenon. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there were subtypes of alexithymia associating with different traits of emotional expression and regulation among a group of healthy college students. Methods: 1788 healthy college students were administered with the Chinese version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and another set of questionnaires assessing emotion status and regulation. A hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted on the three factor scores of the TAS-20. The cluster solution was cross-validated by the corresponding emotional regulation. Results: The results indicated there were four subtypes of alexithymia, namely extrovert-high alexithymia (EHA), general-high alexithymia (GHA), introvert-high alexithymia (IHA) and non-alexithymia (NA). The GHA was characterized by general high scores on all three factors, the IHA was characterized by high scores on difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings but low score on externally oriented cognitive style of thinking, the EHA was characterized by high score on externally oriented cognitive style of thinking but normal score on the others, and the NA got low score on all factors. The GHA and IHA were dominant by suppressive character of emotional regulation and expression with worse emotion status as compared to the EHA and NA. Conclusions: The current findings suggest there were four subtypes of alexithymia characterized by different emotional regulation manifestations.
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Background
Alexithymia has been a familiar conception as no
words for feeling in psychiatry and psychosomatic
medicine since it was first termed by Sifneos [1]. Now its
definition is more explicitly refined with five dominant
features: (1) difficulty in identifying ones emotion; (2)
difficulty in describing self feelings verbally; (3) a
reduction or incapability to experience emotions; (4) an
absence of tendencies to image one elses emotion, or
an externally oriented cognitive style; and (5) poor
capacity for fantasize or symbolic thought [2]. Alexithymia
refers to a specific disturbance in emotional processing,
especially reduced capabilities in verbalizing and
realizing emotion. Longitudinal study also suggested that
alexithymia was significantly associated with the severity
of depression [3], anxiety [4] and schizophrenia [5]. The
prevalence rate of alexithymia is significantly higher in
patients with psychosomatic disorders, such as eating
disorder [6], fibromyalgia syndrome [7] and low-back
pain [8], than control groups.
Researchers [9,10] found alexithymia overlaps with
various dimensions like external locus of control and
irrational beliefs, except impulsiveness, of the
FiveFactor Model (FFM) of personality in an undergraduate
student sample. It has been speculated that alexithymia
is a cognitive state of externally oriented thinking with
an emotional instability and unsecure performance in
controlling stressful situation. However, alexithymia has
also been criticized whether it is an affect-deficit
disorder (state-orient) or a continuous personality variable
(trait-orient). Tolmunen et al. [11] considered
alexithymia as a stable personality trait in general. Their 11-year
follow-up study also suggested that alexithymia might
increase vulnerability to depressive symptoms [11].
Honkalampi [12] further demonstrated that depressive
symptom might act as a mediator between alexithymia
and psychiatric morbidity. Parker and Mattila used
taxometric analysis to synthesize several studies about
alexithymia in large sample pools including general
population and psychotic patients [11,12]. These
findings suggest that aleixhtymia is not a discrete affect
deficit type of person but represents the lower tail of
an emotion processing ability that is continuously
distributed in the general population [11].
The purpose of this study was to examine whether
there might be subtypes of alexithymia characterized by
different behavioural manifestations. In so doing, the
current study adopted a cluster analytical approach to
examine whether there were natural grouping of people
characterized by different psychological features
associating with alexithymia. Cluster analysis is a statistical
procedure for determining cases can be placed into
groups if they share properties in common, while the
cases in different clusters are as dissimilar as possible. It
was hypothesized that there were various subtypes of
alexithymia characterized by different psychological
features associating with alexithymia.
Individuals on various level of alexithymia would
adopt different ways to express and regulate their
emotion. The higher alexithymia groups would perform
more seri (...truncated)