OBJECTIVE To study alexithymia among mothers with disabled children in Saudi Arabia, and to explore if alexithymia is associated to their mood difficulties, and certain demographic variables. METHODS We conducted a prospective study during January 2011 to April 2012, on 86 mothers (study group) caring for children with physical, mental, or sensory disabilities treated at a major tertiary reha...

The study of Sarkar and Chandra (2003) attempts to show the prevalence of alexithymia and its association with abnormal illness behaviour among a socioculturally homogeneous group of patients with somatic symptoms. A somewhat similar study (Radhika 1997) was conducted in a general hospital psychiatry unit on 71 patients (a rather sociocultually heterogeneous but with 70% Hindu population) prese...

Alexithymia presents a deficit in identifying and expressing emotions, paucity of fantasies, and an externally oriented cognitive style. Numerous recent studies have documented that alexithymia is significantly related to dysregulation of immune functions. These findings implicate that stressors related to alexithymia could underlie the process of immune dysregulation that likely presents a sig...

BACKGROUND Up to fifty percent of alcohol dependent individuals have alexithymia, a personality trait characterised by difficulties identifying and describing feelings, a lack of imagination and an externalised cognitive style. Although studies have examined alexithymia in relation to alcohol dependence, no research exists on mechanisms underlying this relationship. The present study examined t...

OBJECTIVES The present study was conducted to investigate the role of metacognition beliefs and general health in alexithymia in Iranian students. METHODS This descriptive and correlational study included 200 participants of high schools students, selected randomly from students of two cities (Sari and Dargaz), Iran. Metacognitive Strategies Questionnaire (MCQ-30); the General Health Question...

Alexithymia and the emotional symptoms of autism 2 Abstract (222 words) It is widely accepted that autism is associated with disordered emotion processing, and in particular, with deficits of emotional reciprocity such as impaired emotion recognition and reduced empathy. However, a close examination of the literature reveals wide heterogeneity within the autistic population with respect to emot...

Alexithymia is a patient characteristic that reflects deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotions. It is generally considered to have an adverse effect on the outcome of psychotherapy. Little is known about the processes through which alexithymia exerts this effect. One proposed mechanism suggests that patients with alexithymia trigger negative therapist reactions that contr...

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 Alexithy...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the course of alexithymia and its relation with anxiety and depression in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), over a period of 5 years. METHODS Sixty-two MS patients were examined at two timepoints, 5 years apart, and they answered questionnaires collecting socio-demographic, medical, and psychological data (depression, anxiety, alexithymi...

OBJECTIVE We studied the prevalence of alexithymia, its distribution in different age groups in a wide age range, its association with sociodemographic and health-related variables, and its co-occurrence with depression. METHODS The study forms part of the Health 2000 Study. The original sample comprised 8028 subjects representing the general adult population of Finland. Alexithymia was measu...