Ability to speak at the age of 1 year and alexithymia 30 years later

The relationship between alexithymia and perinatal depressive symptomatology

“…Finally, if the mother is encouraged to teach her child to recognize his or her moods and to learn how to manage them, such an intervention could reduce transgenerational transmission of alexithymia and may also reduce risk for lifetime depression in the child. This is particularly important given recent findings suggesting that a child's ability to speak at 1 year of age was associated with decreased levels of alexithymia 30 years later [51]. Studies testing whether transgenerational risk for alexithymia can be reduced, and whether this decreases the risk for depression, could lead to substantial improvements in the health of both mothers and their children, await further research.…”

Epidemiology of alexithymia among adolescents

“…Children from broken homes were also more alexithymic than those from intact homes. Kauhanen [18] and Kokkonen et al [19] have earlier proposed that alexithymia could be a long developmental process starting in childhood and exacerbating in a social context. The findings of the present study can be seen as supporting this theory.…”

New Trends in Alexithymia Research

“…The study found that alexithymia in adulthood was associated with being an unwanted child, being born into a family with many children, and particularly strongly with a rural upbringing [42]. In addition, alexithymia was associated with the ability to speak words at one-year of age, the mean TAS-20 score of the adults being lowest among early speakers [43]. These results suggest that social factors in childhood as well as individual differences in early linguistic development may play a role in the etiology of alexithymia.…”