Although clinical observations suggest that alexithymic individuals have a deficit in their ability to recognize emotional stimuli and that this deficit is not simply due to a problem in verbal labeling, these two hypotheses have not been empirically confirmed. Three hundred eighty participants in a community survey without current or past histories of psychiatric disorder completed two independent measures of alexithymia [the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20)] and the Perception of Affect Task (PAT), a 140-item measure of the ability to match emotion stimuli. The PAT includes four subtasks that require the subject to match verbal or nonverbal emotion stimuli with verbal or nonverbal emotion responses. The subtasks include matching sentences and words (verbal-verbal), faces and words (nonverbal-verbal), sentences and faces (verbal-nonverbal), and faces and photographs of scenes (nonverbal-nonverbal). Across the entire sample, higher (alexithymic) TAS-20 and lower LEAS scores were both correlated with lower accuracy rates on each of the subtasks of the PAT (p < .001), accounting for 10.5% and 18.4% of the variance, respectively. Fifty-one subjects met TAS-20 criteria for alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals scored lower than other subjects on purely nonverbal matching, purely verbal matching, and mixed verbal-nonverbal matching (all p < .001). These results suggest that alexithymia is associated with impaired verbal and nonverbal recognition of emotion stimuli and that the hallmark of alexithymia, a difficulty in putting emotion into words, may be a marker of a more general impairment in the capacity for emotion information processing.

Successful clinical practice demands that we use good judgment in choosing optimal treatments for the conditions in question. However, the criteria on which we base our choice are often implicit. In this article, it is argued that practicing clinicians can enhance the quality of these judgments by attending more explicitly to the strength and integrity of treatment as well as to specific standards of treatment effectiveness. Numerous examples from the psychological and evaluation literature are utilized to portray the practical considerations and problems inherent to this approach. By monitoring strength, integrity, and effectiveness for the duration of treatment, we can make appropriate mid-course corrections and determine the relationship among these three critical dimensions of treatment.Many of the issues confronted by research scientists are also likely to be quite relevant to professionals who evaluate and treat personal problems. We have recently written several papers that deal with issues of special interest to evaluation researchers in the fields of health and psychology. The concepts in these papers are not field-specific and appear to us to be quite pertinent to practicing clinicians as well. Our major purpose in the present article, then, is to suggest alternative perspectives on and procedures for clinical research and practice that may be particularly useful to clinicians. Testing these procedures in the proving grounds of clinical practice may in turn generate other new concepts of interest to research scientists. Issues Regarding the Choice and Maintenance of Successful TreatmentsThere is a seemingly infinite number of aspects of the patient-problem nexus that will potentially influence the choice of treatments for clinical problems. However, our emphasis will instead be directed to impor-Requests for reprints should be sent to

Age differences in emotion recognition from lexical stimuli and facial expressions were examined in a cross-sectional sample of adults aged 18 to 85 (N = 357). Emotion-specific response biases differed by age: Older adults were disproportionately more likely to incorrectly label lexical stimuli as happiness, sadness, and surprise and to incorrectly label facial stimuli as disgust and fear. After these biases were controlled, findings suggested that older adults were less accurate at identifying emotions than were young adults, but the pattern differed across emotions and task types. The lexical task showed stronger age differences than the facial task, and for lexical stimuli, age groups differed in accuracy for all emotional states except fear. For facial stimuli, in contrast, age groups differed only in accuracy for anger, disgust, fear, and happiness. Implications for age-related changes in different types of emotional processing are discussed.

Preliminary versions of the results of the survey and the commentary were presented in L. S. Aiken and S. G. West (chairs), Adequacy of Methodological and Quantitative Training: Perspectives of the Disciplines,

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