Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in the experience and cognitive processing of emotions. It is considered a risk factor for a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders. Functional neuroimaging studies investigating the neural correlates of alexithymia have reported inconsistent results. To integrate previous findings, we conducted a parametric coordinate-based meta-analysis including fifteen neuroimaging studies on emotion processing in alexithymia. During the processing of negative emotional stimuli, alexithymia was associated with a diminished response of the amygdala, suggesting decreased attention to such stimuli. Negative stimuli additionally elicited decreased activation in supplementary motor and premotor brain areas and in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, possibly underlying poor empathic abilities and difficulties in emotion regulation associated with alexithymia. Positive stimuli elicited decreased activation in the right insula and precuneus, suggesting reduced emotional awareness in alexithymia regarding positive affect. Independent of valence, higher (presumably compensatory) activation was found in the dorsal anterior cingulate possibly indicating increased cognitive demand. These results suggest valence-specific as well as valence-independent effects of alexithymia on the neural processing of emotions.

Alexithymia is a concept created by Sifneos in 1972 to describe a disturbance in affective and cognitive functions characterised by an inability to find words to describe feelings or emotions. The term "alexithymia" is derived from the Greek and means "no words for feelings". The salient clinical features of alexithymia include difficulties recognizing and verbalizing feelings, endless description of physical symptoms instead of emotions, concrete speech and thougth closely tied to external events, paucity of fantasy life. Precisely, alexithymia is an inability to associate one's visual image, thoughts and fantasies with a specific emotional state. For Sifneos, "emotions" and "feelings" are different facts. He differentiates "visceral emotions" (biologic side of the affect and lying in structures of the limbic system as the hippocampus and the amygdaloid complex) and "feelings emotions" (psychologic side of the affect). For him, animals experience "visceral emotion", but only human experience "feeling emotions". Alexithymia is regarded as one of several possible risk factors that seem to increase the susceptibility to physical disease. Alexithymia describes some psychological features which has been initially described by Marty and Psychosomatic French School: a specific cognitive style characterized by a lack of absence of fantasies and a preoccupation with the minute details of external events ("pensée opératoire"). Alexithymia is a difficult concept to operationalize and only few instruments are sufficiently reliable and valid. Several scales are used to measure alexithymia but only the Beth Israel Questionnaire (BIQ) and the Toronto Alexithymie Scale (TAS) can be regarded as having sufficient psychometric properties. The first questionnaire, the BIQ--a scale created by Sifneos--, is the most widely used instrument which is a 17-items forced-choice questionnaire completed by the interviewer. The TAS is a 26-items self-report measure rated on a five-point Likert scale. The Shalling Sifneos Psychosomatic Scale (SSPS) and the M.M.P.I. Alexithymia Scale lack of validation and reliability. Furthermore the SSPS and the MMPI AS show little or no relation with BIQ or with TAS, thus limiting the comparability and generalizability of results from the studies that use them. The TAS is considered as internally consistent and to have a stable, replicable factor structure. Other measures as content analysis test, projective test (Rorschach, T.AT., SAT9) or others self-assessment questionnaires are not frequently used.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Abstract Background Alexithymia is the inability to identify and describe one’s own emotions. Adolescents who suffer from Restrictive Eating Disorders (REDs) show a higher prevalence of alexithymia than the general population. Methods The study explored the correlation between levels of alexithymia in mothers, fathers, and adolescents affected by REDs and patients’ ability to recognize their emotions. The study also aimed to evaluate if patients’ emotional distress can significantly impact the severity of their disorder and functioning measured by the Clinical Global Impression Scale - Severity (CGI-S) and the Children’s Global Assessment Scale (CGAS). We enrolled 67 families of adolescents affected by REDs. Parents and patients’ levels of alexithymia were assessed through the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Spearman’s correlation shows a statistically significant correlation between mothers and patients’ levels of alexithymia. Results Our findings also suggest that fathers and mothers’ TAS scores correlate with each other. However, there is no statistically significant relationship between the influence of the TAS scores of fathers and sons/daughters. Conclusions In conclusion, mothers’ level of alexithymia could influence both fathers and patients’ difficulty in identifying and describing their own emotions. This relationship can be investigated further when considering externally oriented thinking. However, the severity of the disease and overall functioning do not app

Emotional Developmental Disorders: The Case of Alexithymia and Self-harm. From Psychological and Neuroscientific Research to Psychotherapy - The paper examines the contribution that psychological and neuroscientific research on emotional developmental problems may offer for psychotherapy. Alexithymia – i.e. the inability to recognize and express one’s own emotions – and self-harm in adolescence are considered as examples of emotional problems. Starting from this analysis, we address some currently debated theoretical and methodological issues in psychotherapy.

A deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions.: #* 2008, Amy Kroska and Sarah K. Harkness, “[http://www.jstor.org/stable/20141830 Exploring the Role of Diagnosis in the Modified Labeling Theory of Mental Illness]” in LXXI, № 2 (Wrestling with Social Psychology, June 2008), page 195: #*: Finally, schizophrenic disorders involve impairments of perceptions, including hallucinations and delusions, symptoms that often impair patients’ social and occupational functioning and can create alexithymia (Maggini and Raballo 2004; van ‛t Wout et al. 2007), an inability to recognize one’s own feelings.

Factor analysis of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale: elucidation of a polythetic construct. The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) offers a reliable method to measure alexithymia, a personality construct describing individuals endorsing the inability to identify and report emotions, processing a minimal fantasy life, utilizing an analytic cognitive style, and tending to somatize. Utilizing four cohorts of both patients and controls, a three-factor solution emerged from a principal-components analysis utilizing a varimax rotation. The factors of inability to identify and report feelings, an analytic cognitive style, and paucity of fantasy life were independent and internally reliable. These data are reviewed in the context of previous research and offer three subscales for future investigations utilizing the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Published in Psychotherapy and psychosomatics (1992)

Stress reactivity in alexithymia: decoupling of physiological and cognitive responses. Alexithymia is described as the lack of awareness of the basis of emotion. Descriptions of alexithymia have primarily been based upon clinical observation with no laboratory validation of the construct. A proposed aspect of alexithymia is an inability to accurately identify emotional stimuli, with a hypothesized decoupling of peripheral physiological activity and accurate report of feeling state. The present study represents an initial attempt to determine whether such a decoupling of feeling state and physiology in response to stress exists in alexithymics. Males (18-25 years) screened for alexithymia using the Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scale (SSPS) were used in subjects (n = 15) along with age-matched nonalexithymic controls (n = 15). All subjects were asymptomatic. Each was individually exposed to a stress quiz while heart rate, frontal EMG, and blood pressure were monitored. The Profile of Mood States (POMS) was administered at four intervals (adaptation, prestress quiz, poststress quiz, and recovery).

in recognizing and expressing one's own emotions and those of others. Two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies indicated that alexithymia may Empathy in autistic individuals is considered a complex topic studied within research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In 1985, British researchers Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith proposed the absence of theory of mind, defined as the inability of autistic individuals to understand the intentions and emotions of others, as a framework for understanding ASD symptoms. Later studies indicated that In 2004, a study of "high-functioning" autistic individuals reported a high prevalence of alexithymia, a personality construct characterized by difficulty in recognizing and expressing one's own emotions and those of others. Two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies indicated that alexithymia may be responsible for reduced empathy in individuals with ASD. The lack of empathic attunement associated with alexithymia can negatively affect the quality and satisfaction of relationships. A 2010 neurological study suggested that empathy deficits in autism may be attributable to the high comorbidity between alexithymia and autism spectrum disorders, rather than to a permanent social deficit.

is characterized by the inability to recognize and verbally describe one's own emotions; markedly reduced … temperature, blood flow to the face, audition of one's own voice, or breathing patterns could be peripheral … (c) the direct question of how a taxonomy of emotions is to be justified and how rival taxonomies are