A Relationship Between Alexithymia and One’s Thoughts of the Emotional Experiences of Others

Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by: difficulty identifying feelings; difficulty describing feelings; and externally oriented thinking (1). Past research has found strong connections between alexithymia and deficits in emotion regulation and emotion recognition. Although alexithymia is not a new construct, the literature has yet to fully explore associations between alexithymia and an individual’s thoughts of others’ emotional experiences. The purpose of the current study was twofold. The first goal was to explore the relationships between alexithymia and ratings of the extent that others experience emotions in general. The second goal was to investigate associations between alexithymia and ratings of the extent that others experience positive emotions and negative emotions. It was predicted that higher alexithymia scores would be associated with lower ratings of the extent that others experience emotions; however, no significant relationship was found between TAS-20 scores and the ERSO Total (r = .08, p > .05). These results imply that although individuals with alexithymia have difficulty identifying emotions from a person’s facial expressions, they do think that the person is experiencing emotion. Additionally, it was predicted that higher alexithymia scores would be associated with higher ratings of extent that others experience negative emotions, and lower ratings of the extent that others experience positive emotions. The results indicate that as alexithymia scores increased, ratings of the extent that others experience positive emotions decreased (b = -.02, SE = .01, p < .05) and ratings of the extent that others experience negative emotions increased (b = .02, SE = .01, p < .01). These findings from the current study support this hypothesis and suggest that individuals with higher alexithymia scores tend to think others experience more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions. Introduction Alexithymia Overview Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by: a) difficulty identifying feelings; b) difficulty describing feelings and; c) externally oriented thinking (1). Difficulty identifying feelings is defined by a person’s difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations that accompany states of emotional arousal, and identifying feelings in oneself. Difficulty describing feelings is defined as difficulty communicating subjective feelings A Relationship Between Alexithymia and One’s Thoughts of the Emotional Experiences of Others Brett H. Pogostin1, Beth Schoenbrun2, Gennarina D. Santorelli3, Tessa S. Lundquist3, and Rebecca E. Ready3* Student1, Teacher2: Scarsdale High School, Scarsdale, New York Mentor3: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts *Corresponding author: ready@psych.umass. edu INTERNSHIP ARTICLE to others (1). Externally oriented thinking is a disposition to focus on external rather than internal events and experiences (2). These three facets of alexithymia are measured by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), which is the most widely used measure to identify and research alexithymia in individuals. Two important facets of alexithymia research are emotion regulation and emotion recognition. Both of which are not included in the definition of alexithymia, but play a role in the understanding of the personality trait. As the literature on alexithymia has grown, many studies have found evidence that alexithymia is related to psychiatric disorders such as depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and anxiety (3). These connections between alexithymia and mental illnesses highlight the importance of studying alexithymia in an attempt to better care for people suffering from these ailments. A study by Troisi, Pasini, Saracco, & Spalletta (1998) found that as alexithymic features in individuals increased, use of cannabis increased as well (3). This study and others have established links between alexithymia and drug abuse (5, 6). Additional studies have investigated the relationship between alexithymia and major depressive disorder, and found an association between the two (7, 8, 9, 10). However, as noted, depression is not the only mental disorder that relates to alexithymia. Wheeler, Greiner, & Boulton (2005) investigated the relationship between alexithymia and eating disorders and found that binge eating was positively correlated with alexithymia (11). Although alexithymia is not a new field, it has not been fully explored, and establishing a further understanding of alexithymia may facilitate the development of different treatment methods for individuals who also suffer from mental disorders. Alexithymia and Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation is characterized by awareness of one’s own emotions, capacity to correctly interpret emotion-related bodily sensations and the aptitude to come to terms with negative emotions (12). Past research has identified an association between alexithymia and multiple facets of emotion regulation, and these various facets of emotion regulation have been explored in the literature (13). For example, a study by Lundh and SimonssonSarnecki (2002) found that individuals who had high alexithymia scores, experienced more difficulty discerning emotion terms from generic bodily sensations and illness words (14). People with alexithymia would rate the word “sick” as a negative emotion when it is actually a state not an emotion. This demonstrates how alexithymia influences an individual’s ability to identify emotions in one’s self. Another characteristic of emotion regulation, which Brett H. Pogostin, Beth Schoenbrun, Gennarina D. Santorelli, Tessa S. Lundquist, and Rebecca E. Ready Page 2 of 7 Materials and Methods Participants: Participants were 64 undergraduate students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the current study, there were more female participants (n = 53) than male (n = 11), and the mean age of the students was 19.93 years old. The participants predominantly reported their race as Caucasian (n = 47), five students indicated their race as Black, nine as Asian American, and three reported their is most important for the current study, is the ability to manage negative emotions. A study by Stasiewicz et al. (2012) explored the relation between alexithymia and emotion regulation, more specifically the ability to come to terms with negative emotions, and found that higher TAS-20 scores were negatively related to a variety of emotion regulation skills (12). Individuals with higher alexithymia scores had more trouble managing negative moods and coping with emotions, which are important parts of emotion regulation. People without alexithymia were able to move on after experiencing negative emotions while people with alexithymia had more trouble coming to terms with their emotions. These results may suggest that individuals with alexithymia may have a predisposition towards negative feelings since these individuals have difficulty managing and coping with negative emotions. Alexithymia and Emotion Recognition Emotion recognition is the ability to identify emotions from some form of stimuli, and thus directly relates to one of the key characteristics of alexithymia: difficulty identifying feelings (15). Unlike emotion regulation which focuses on one’s ability to manage his/ her own emotions, emotion recognition focuses on the ability to accurately identify emotions. There are two types of stimuli that are used to test emotion recognition: verbal and nonverbal. An example of a verbal stimuli is an emotion word, while a nonverbal stimuli can be an emotion scenario or a facial expression. Traditionally, alexithymia has been more strongly related to an inability to recognize emotion in verbal cues (16), which would be in accordance with findings that high alexithymia scores relate to a lower verbal IQ (17). However, it has also been found that high alexithymia relates to deficits in emotion recognition in both verbal and nonverbal situations (16). The majority of studies that have investigated nonverbal stimuli have researched facial expression emotion recognition, and have found that higher alexithymia scores relates to lower emotion recognition for facial expressions (15, 16, 18). The research on emotion recognition that does investigate the recognition of emotions in others are facial expression studies that did not intend to study others versus self, but rather the difference between the recognition of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues (16). Although it was not the main purpose of the research, these findings seem to suggest that individuals with higher alexithymia scores will not only have difficulty identifying feelings in themselves, but also have more difficulty than individuals with low alexithymia scores in identifying the emotions of others. Positive and Negative Emotions in Alexithymia Positive and negative emotion identification has been a topic of much alexithymia literature. As previously discussed, past research has found a strong negative relationship between alexithymia and emotion regulation skills, and more specifically, one’s ability to cope and manage negative emotions (12). This deficit in the regulation of negative emotions seems to imply that individuals with alexithymia may identify more negative emotions in themselves since these individuals have difficulty regulating these specific emotions. This conclusion is supported by a study by Yelsma (2007) found that alexithymia was associated with heightened negative emotion awareness and lower positive emotion awareness (19). Further support is provided by the findings that the TAS-20 correlates positively to the Neuroticism dimension of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, and negatively with the Positive Emotions subscale of the Extraversion dimension (20). These findings demonstrate that alexithymia is related to heightened negative affect and lower positive affect. A study by Connelly and Denney (2007)