Alexithymia is a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness which has been gaining diagnostic prevalence in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, with notably high rates of overlap with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the nature of its role in ASD symptomatology remains elusive. Here, we distill research at the intersection of alexithymia and ASD. After a brief synopsis of the studies that played a pioneering role in the identification of the overlapping fields between alexithymia and ASD, we comb the literature for evidence of its overlap with ASD in terms of prevalence, etiology, and behaviors. Through a formalized framework of the process of emotional interpretation and expression, we explore evidence for where and how deficits arise in this complex network of events. We portray how these relate to the dynamic interplay between alexithymic and autistic traits and find emerging evidence that alexithymia is both a cause and consequence of autistic behaviors. We end with a strategic proposal for future research and interventions to dampen the impacts of alexithymia in ASD.

According to the traditional view, both imageability and concreteness ratings reflect the way word meanings rely on information mediated by the senses. As a consequence, the two measures should and do correlate. The link between these two indexes was already hypothesized and demonstrated by Paivio et al. (1968) in a seminal article, where they introduced the idea of imageability ratings for the first time. However, in this first study, they also noted a contrasting pattern in the ratings for imageability and concreteness with some words that refer to affective attitudes or emotional states receiving high imageability but low concreteness ratings. Recent studies confirm this inconsistency (e.g., Altarriba and Bauer, 2004) leading to the claim that emotion words form a particular class of terms different from both concrete and abstract words. Here we use the MRC psycholinguistic database to show that the there are other classes of terms for which imageability and concreteness are uncorrelated. We show that the common feature of these word classes is that they directly or indirectly refer to proprioceptive, interoceptive, or affective states, i.e., to internal, body-related, sensory experiences. Thus, imageability and concreteness can no longer be considered interchangeable constructs; rather, imageability is a different, and perhaps more interesting, measure: it not only reflects the ease with which memories of external events come to mind, as previously hypothesized, but also reflects the ease with which memories of internal events come to mind.

The term “alexithymia” was introduced in the lexicon of psychiatry in the early ‘70s by Sifneos to outline the difficulties manifested by some patients in identifying and describing their own emotions. Since then, the construct has been broadened and partially modified. Today this describes a condition characterized by an altered emotional awareness which leads to difficulties in recognizing your own and others' emotions. In half a century, the volume of scientific products focusing on alexithymia has exceeded 5,000. Such an expansive knowledge domain poses a difficulty for those willing to understand how alexithymia research has developed. Scientometrics embodies a solution to this issue, employing computational, and visual analytic methods to uncover meaningful patterns within large bibliographical corpora. In this study, we used the CiteSpace software to examine a corpus of 4,930 publications on alexithymia ranging from 1980 to 2020 and their 100,251 references included in Web of Science. Document co-citation analysis was performed to highlight pivotal publications and major research areas on alexithymia, whereas journal co-citation analysis was conducted to find the related editorial venues and disciplinary communities. The analyses suggest that the construct of alexithymia experienced a gradual thematic and disciplinary shift. Although the first conceptualization of alexithymia came from psychoanalysis and psychosomatics, empirical research was pushed by the operationalization of the construct formulated at the end of the ‘80s. Specifically, the development of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, currently the most used self-report instrument, seems to have encouraged both the entrance of new disciplines in the study of alexithymia (i.e., cognitive science and neuroscience) and an implicit redefinition of its conceptual nucleus. Overall, we discuss opportunities and limitations in the application of this bottom-up approach, which highlights trends in alexithymia research that were previously identified only through a qualitative, theory-driven approach.

The long-standing hypothesis that emotions rely on bodily states is back in the spotlight. This has led some researchers to suggest that alexithymia, a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, reflects a general deficit in interoception. However, tests of this hypothesis have relied on heterogeneous assessment methods, leading to inconsistent results. To shed some light on this issue, we administered a battery of self-report questionnaires of interoception and alexithymia to three samples from Italy, the U.S., and Singapore (N = 814). Correlation and machine learning analyses showed that alexithymia was associated with deficits in both subjective interoceptive accuracy and attention. Alexithymics’ interoceptive deficits were primarily related to difficulty identifying and describing feelings. Interoception showed a weaker association with externally-oriented thinking as operationalized by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and no association with the affective dimension of alexithymia later introduced by the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ). We discuss our results with reference to the theoretical and psychometric differences between these two measures of alexithymia and their shortcomings. Overall, our results support the view that interoceptive deficits are a core component of alexithymia, although the latter cannot be reduced to the former.

Quality teaching in large classes is generally challenging to achieve. In large classes, there are fewer possibilities for students to interact with the teacher and with each other; the motivation to study decreases as does the possibility for receiving feedback during the learning process. This can result, among other things, in reduced understanding of the learning material and therefore in lower academic performance. The aim of this study is to investigate whether computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) can have a positive impact on aspects of quality teaching such as interaction, motivation and understanding. Two online collaborative activities were designed and implemented in a regularly scheduled course with approximately 200 undergraduate students. This study adopted a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative analysis: data were collected from surveys, in-depth interviews, forum logs, and exam scores. The results show that CSCL facilitates motivation, interaction and achievement of deep understanding. More particularly, one CSCL activity was found to be a significant contributor to students' academic performance and this confirmed that traditional lecturing blended with CSCL improves the quality of the teaching compared to traditional lecturing only, at least as far as understanding is concerned.Moreover, the study indicates that different types of collaborative activities have different effects on learning and that the design of collaborative activities is therefore critical to outcomes. In this respect, it also reveals that social loafing, which is usually considered to have only negative effects on collaboration, can instead have a positive impact on learning if the task is appropriately designed.