Alexithymia as a Core Trait in Psychosomatic and Other Psychological Disorders

Abstract

Alexithymia is a term derived from the psychoanalytic tradition and used to describe the difficulties observed in psychosomatic patients when reporting on their emotions during clinical interviews. Based on an extensive literature, alexithymia appears to involve both emotion processing and emotion regulation difficulties. Emotional information tends to vary along two primary dimensions, based on factor analytic findings on emotion adjectives and ratings of emotional materials across cultures. These orthogonal dimensions are valence and arousal, whereas a third dimension, dominance (how much in control one feels in the emotional situation), is positively related to valence. This chapter provides a case example that highlights many of the essential features of alexithymia. It discusses the research findings from the author's laboratory. Based on findings, alexithymia appears to present with deficits during processing and regulation of emotional situations, primarily characterized by physiological hyporeactivity, an avoidant emotion regulation style, and difficulty adjusting to the shifting demands of the environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)