Adult Attachment Behavior and Alexithymia in a Nonclinical Sample from Italy

The present research explored the relationship between adult attachment style and alexithymia in a non-clinical population of adults. The quality of attachment developed during the child's growth remains stable over time, and determines, even in adult relationships, various phenomena including the ability to regulate emotions. Alexithymia is a particular form of inability to recognize and regulate emotions that originates from childhood relational dysfunctions and persists into adulthood. As suggested in literature, an overall insecure style is consistently associated with higher levels of alexithymia, while the results are conflicting when it comes to associate a specific insecure pattern with alexithymia and its several dimensions. The purpose of the research was to study the relationship between different dysfunctional types of attachment and the level of alexithymia in a population of healthy adults. Participants compiled the Relationship Questionnaire (RQ) and the TAS-20 to assess adult attachment patterns and alexithymia characteristics, respectively. A group of 53 subjects (28 females) participated in the study. Consistent with the literature, results showed that the insecure style, as a general factor, predicts greater levels of alexithymia. The fearful and dismissing patterns appear predictors of high total scores on the TAS-20. Considering the TAS-20 subscales, a fearful style is predictive of greater difficulties in identifying and describing feelings, while dismissing style is associated with the concrete way of thinking of the TAS-20. No association was found between the preoccupied pattern and alexithymia and its three dimensions. Present results, while not implying a causal nature of the identified relationship, are overall promising and have confirmed the relevance of a significant association between attachment behavior and alexithymia. It would be interesting to investigate the association between adult attachment behavior and alexithymia using interview-rated instruments. Finally, the presence of differences between frightened and distancing, is an aspect that should be further investigated, as it could be significant in clinical practice

Affect Intensity and Subjective Ratings of Emotional Pictures and Sounds

Affect intensity refers to the intensity with which people experience their emotional response. Individual differences in affect intensity are supposed to be related to the strength of the response to emotional stimuli. Previous studies showed that participants with high affect intensity responded to emotional stimuli with stronger or more intense affective reactions than participants scoring low in affect intensity However, previous studies are mainly limited to the impact of affect intensity on consumer responses to advertising appeals or are limited to the use of life events descriptions as emotional stimuli. No previous studies used behavioural measures of the emotional response to standardized stimuli, varying in terms of arousal. In the present study the predictive value of affect intensity, measured by a self-report questionnaire, the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM), on the emotional response to standardized pictures and sounds has been investigated. In particular, the predictive value of affective intensity measured by the AIM, using both the total AIM total score and the four subscales scores, on subjective arousal ratings of different categories of standardized emotional pictures and sounds was assessed on a nonclinical sample. The total AIM score has been found to be predictive for subjective arousal scores for low unpleasant pictures while, using the AIM subscales scores, results showed that the Negative Reactivity subscale was predictive for arousal scores to high negative pictures and sounds. These findings seem to show that the use of the total AIM score can obscure the relationships between specific features of affect intensity and other variables. Moreover, the present results didn’t show a general effect of affect intensity on behavioural responses to emotional standardized stimuli but an emotion specific effect for high negative stimuli

Different Aspects of Emotional Awareness in Relation to Motor Cognition and Autism Traits

Data Availability Statement The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. Funding Research was conducted as part of CH’s PhD studies, supported by a studentship from the Northwood Trust. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Margaret Jackson for providing testing space and assistance with the ethics procedures.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Alexithymia in juvenile primary headache sufferers: a pilot study

Starting in the 1990s, there has been accumulating evidence of alexithymic characteristics in adult patients with primary headache. Little research has been conducted, however, on the relationship between alexithymia and primary headache in developmental age. In their research on alexithymia in the formative years, the authors identified one of the most promising prospects for research, as discussed here. The aim of this study was to verify whether there is: (a) a link between tension-type headache and alexithymia in childhood and early adolescence; and (b) a correlation between alexithymia in children/preadolescents and their mothers. This study was based on an experimental group of 32 patients (26 females and 6 males, aged from 8 to 15 years, mean 11.2 ± 2.0) suffering from tension-type headache and 32 control subjects (26 females and 6 males, aged from 8 to 15 years, mean 11.8 ± 1.6). Tension-type headache was diagnosed by applying the International Headache Classification (ICHD-II, 2004). The alexithymic construct was measured using an Italian version of the Alexithymia Questionnaire for Children in the case of the juvenile patients and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) for their mothers. Higher rates of alexithymia were observed in the children/preadolescents in the experimental group (EG) than in the control group; in the EG there was no significant correlation between the alexithymia rates in the children/preadolescents and in their mothers

Language and alexithymia: Evidence for the role of the inferior frontal gyrus in acquired alexithymia

The clinical relevance of alexithymia, a condition associated with difficulties identifying and describing one’s own emotion, is becoming ever more apparent. Increased rates of alexithymia are observed in multiple psychiatric conditions, and also in neurological conditions resulting from both organic and traumatic brain injury. The presence of alexithymia in these conditions predicts poorer regulation of one’s emotions, decreased treatment response, and increased burden on carers. While clinically important, the aetiology of alexithymia is still a matter of debate, with several authors arguing for multiple ‘routes’ to impaired understanding of one’s own emotions, which may or may not result in distinct subtypes of alexithymia. While previous studies support the role of impaired interoception (perceiving bodily states) in the development of alexithymia, the current study assessed whether acquired language impairment following traumatic brain injury, and damage to language regions, may also be associated with an increased risk of alexithymia. Within a sample of 129 participants with penetrating brain injury and 33 healthy controls, neuropsychological testing revealed that deficits in a non-emotional language task, object naming, were associated with alexithymia, specifically with difficulty identifying one’s own emotions. Both region-of-interest and whole-brain lesion analyses revealed that damage to language regions in the inferior frontal gyrus was associated with the presence of both this language impairment and alexithymia. These results are consistent with a framework for acquired alexithymia that incorporates both interoceptive and language processes, and support the idea that brain injury may result in alexithymia via impairment in any one of a number of more basic processes

Alexithymia, Depression, Trait-anxiety and Their Relation to Self-reported Retrospective Dream Experience

The present research explored the relationship between alexithymia, self-reported depression and trait anxiety and dreaming experience in a non-clinical sample. Characteristics of the alexithymia trait, such as the deficit in the symbolic representation of emotions and the limited imaginative ability, can have an impact on the richness and quality of dream experience. Depression and trait anxiety are both reported to be related to alexithymia and dreaming. A group of 30 non-clinical subjects (20 females) participated in the study. Alexithymia was assessed with the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA), an observer-report instrument composed of 24 questions that assesses a general subjective level of alexithymia and 4 dimensions of alexithymia: Identifying emotional feelings (DIF), Describing emotional feelings (DDF), Imaginal Processes (IMP); and Externally oriented thinking (EOT). The subjective dreaming experience was assessed with the Mannheim Dream Questionnaire (MADRE), an instrument that was designed to elicit some form of dream history including dream recall frequency, use and correlates of dream, attitude towards dream and presence of different kinds of dreams experience, such as nightmares, lucid dreams, and d\ue9j\ue0-vu. The BDI-2 and the STAIY2 were administered to evaluate negative affect. Two multivariate multiple regression analysis were carried on. Results showed that alexithymia was related to dream correlates and to attitude towards dream. Trait anxiety was found to be related to nightmares frequency and self-reported depression to d\ue9j\ue0-vu event. In the future, it would be interesting to use a larger and more representative sample. The use of clinical population, such as nightmare sufferers or patients with sleep and/or mental disorders, could possibly disclosure further meaningful relationships among affect dysregulation, affect modulation and self-reported retrospective dream characteristics