Search

The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) is the most widely used instrument for assessing alexithymia, with more than 25 years of research supporting its reliability and validity. The items that compose this scale were written to operationalize the components of the construct that are based on clinical observations of patients and thought to reflect deficits in the cognitive processing of emotions. The Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ) is a recently introduced measure and is based on a theoretical attention-appraisal model of alexithymia. An important step with any newly developed measure is to evaluate whether it demonstrates incremental validity over existing measures. In this study using a community sample (N = 759), a series of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted that included an array of measures assessing constructs closely associated with alexithymia. Overall, the TAS-20 showed strong associations with these various constructs to which the PAQ was unable to add any meaningful increase in prediction relative to the TAS-20. We conclude that until future studies with clinical samples using several different criterion variables demonstrate incremental validity of the PAQ, the TAS-20 should remain the self-report measure of choice for clinicians and researchers assessing alexithymia, albeit as part of a multi-method approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of pensée opératoire (operational thinking) was introduced by French psychoanalysts in 1963 and a decade later was included as an essential component of the alexithymia construct as formulated by the U.S. analysts John Nemiah and Peter Sifneos. Despite a large body of research on alexithymia, the pensée opératoire component is not well understood, especially among clinicians and researchers who are not familiar with French psychoanalytic literature. In this article we clarify the definition and metapsychological conceptualization of the concept, review findings from some relevant empirical studies, and critique a recent proposal for redefining the alexithymia construct that departs from the original understanding of pensée opératoire. We also discuss some clinical implications of the concept and some strategies that psychotherapists can employ in the treatment of patients with this mode of thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a wealth of research on the validity of alexithymia and its association with a number of common medical and psychiatric disorders, the fundamental question of whether alexithymia is best conceptualized as a dimensional or categorical construct remains unresolved. In the current investigation, taxometric analysis is used to examine the nature of the latent structure of alexithymia. Several nonredundant taxometric procedures were performed with item sets from the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (R. M. Bagby, J. D. A. Parker, & G. J. Taylor, 1994) as indicators. These procedures were applied separately in large community (n = 1,933) and undergraduate (n = 1,948) samples and in a smaller sample of psychiatric outpatients (n = 302). The results across various taxometric procedures and the different samples provide strong support that alexithymia is a dimensional construct. Some theoretical implications of these findings for research on the alexithymia construct are discussed. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures and 4 footnotes.)

The possibility that alexithymia may be a culture-bound construct was evaluated by developing a Hindi version of the Twenty-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale and assessing its psychometric properties in a sample of 285 normal young adults in India. The Hindi version of the scale (TAS-20-H) showed excellent cross-language equivalence with the English verison. In addition, the TAS-20-H demonstrated adequate internal consistency, good test-retest reliability, and a three-factor structure consistent with the three-factor model of the original scale.

Recently, the alexithymia construct has emerged as a heuristically useful personality construct in the explanation of the pathogenesis of a variety of physical illnesses. Research that has evaluated the alexithymia construct, however, has been conducted with little attention to the psychometric properties of the various scales constructed to measure it. This study investigated the underlying dimensions and factor structure stability of the MMPI Alexithymia scale (MMPI-A). The MMPI-A was administered to 552 undergraduates, and the data then were split randomly into two samples. Factor analysis of both samples produced a three-factor solution with little theoretical relevancy to the alexithymia construct. Comparisons of the factor structures from the two samples revealed only moderate congruence, which indicates an unstable factor structure.

Subtypes of Alexithymia Although Nemiah and Sifneos were not entirely clear as to whether they regarded alexithymia as a categorical or dimensional construct, they never conceptualized different types or kinds of alexithymia. Fifty years ago, I Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics i published an article by John Nemiah and Peter Sifneos [[1]] in which they reported some clinical observations on the mentation of a group of patients with "classic" psychosomatic diseases. These changes include adding an emotionalizing component to the alexithymia construct, removing the restricted imaginal activity facet, dividing alexithymia into categorically distinct subtypes, renaming severe degrees of alexithymia as "affective agnosia", reconceptualizing the construct within the framework of an attention-appraisal model, and theorizing alexithymia as a general deficit in interoception. [Extracted from the article]