Alexithymia and Psychiatric Symptoms in a Population of Nursery Workers: A Study Using the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale

Abstract

Alexithymia was investigated in a sample of professional nursery workers in Huddinge community, Sweden. Also investigated were feelings of well-being, symptoms of somatic and psychic anxiety, depressive symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms, and level of social dysfunction. The prevalence of alexithymia was 7.9%. Half of the items assessing somatic anxiety and 28.5% of those assessing depressive symptoms were related to high TAS-20 scores. The feeling factors of TAS-20, difficulty in identifying and expressing feelings, accounted in this study for the majority of relationships to the other variables. Externally-oriented thinking remained independent and mainly nonrelated to the other measured variables. It was hypothesized that a deficit in the cognitive processing and modulation of emotions may leave alexithymic individuals prone to states of heightened sympathetic arousal. Confirmation of these theories was found in this study where participants expressing high levels of vegetative and visceral symptoms of anxiety also gained high scores for alexithymia and depressive symptoms.

Relación entre alexitimia y hostilidad: ¿una asociación influida por el malestar psicológico?

“…En ellos la alexitimia aparece asociada de forma moderada y significativa con el trastorno depresivo, tanto en muestras de pacientes psiquiátricos (Handelsman, Stein, Bernstein et aL, 2000;Luminet, Bagby y Taylor, 2001;Rief et aL, 1996) como en muestras con población normal (Modestin, Furrer y Malti, 2004;Posse et aL, 2001;Sandín et aL, 1996). De las tres dimensiones que componen la alexitimia, la dificultad para identificar y discriminar los sentimientos parece que es la que tiene un mayor peso en<la predicción de la depresión (Posse et aL, 2001;Saarijarvi, Salminen y Toikka, 2001;Sandín et aL, 1996), si bien algunos datos apoyan la superioridad predictiva de la dificultad para describir sentimientos (Eizaguirre, Saenz de Cabezón, Alda et aL, 2004;Marchesi, Brusamonti y Maggini, 2000). Muchas de estas investigaciones, sin embargo, adolecen de haberse centrado en el estudio de la influencia de la alexitimia sobre la depresión una vez que ésta ha sido diagnosticada ya como trastorno, prestando menos atención a los efectos sobre el estado anímico depresivo.…”