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According to attachment theorists, affect regulation and quality of attachment are closely linked. As a personality trait associated with deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of affects, alexithymia has been hypothesized to correlate with insecure attachment. To test this hypothesis, we studied the relationships between alexithymia, adult attachment style, and retrospective memories of separation anxiety symptoms during childhood in 100 young men with clinically significant mood symptoms. The most common DSM-IV diagnosis (N = 72) was adjustment disorder with depressed mood, with anxiety, or with mixed anxiety and depressed mood. Each participant completed the Twenty-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the state form of the State-Trait Anxiety Index (STAI), the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ), the Relationship Questionnaire (RQ), and the Separation Anxiety Symptom Inventory (SASI). Alexithymic traits were more pronounced in those participants who had patterns of insecure attachment and who reported more severe symptoms of separation anxiety during childhood, independently of the severity of their current anxiety and depressive symptoms. Among the subgroup of participants with insecure attachment styles, those with preoccupied or fearful patterns had a higher prevalence of alexithymia (65% and 73%, respectively) than those with a dismissing pattern (36%). These data suggest a role for early developmental factors in the etiology of alexithymia

Our findings suggest the existence of a continuum from normalcy to pathology in neural response to body image, and confirm the clinical relevance of body image distortion in AN, reinforcing the key role of attentive, executive and self-evaluation networks in AN visual processing of own distorted body image.

Collectively, our findings demonstrate that sensitization to cocaine in early life-stressed individuals involves brain and peripheral immune responses and that this mechanism is shared between mice and humans.

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The international literature shows that in 40-50% of the cases, homicides-suicides involving children under the age of 10 are committed by mothers. Here, we report some results on homicides-suicides, in the mother-child relationship, occurred in Italy between 1992 and 2010. We examined 36 cases of filicide-suicide mothers by consulting the archives of RAI, daily newspapers, and the ANSA news agency. We focused on: mothers and children's age, place of residence, date and place of the murder, number and sex of the murdered children, and modality of the homicide-suicide. At the time of the homicide-suicide, the average age of mothers was 35.4. The number of children killed by each mother was one, except in seven cases. All the women had underestimated psychopathological disorders and only six women were regularly treated. The dynamics and characteristics of the events were much more similar to suicides than homicides, so we can consider them as "extensive suicides."

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