Alexithymia in personality disorders: Correlations with symptoms and interpersonal functioning

Is reflective functioning associated with clinical symptoms and long-term course in patients with personality disorders?

“…Whether AvPD is associated with even more mentalizing difficulties than BPD is not clear. Mentalizing deficits in patients with AvPD could reflect a more general limited access to mental states and poor emotional awareness [25,64], rather than context dependent hyperarousal and impulsivity typical of BPD. Thus, related to the discussion above, there is a possibility that AAI based RF is not equally able to capture the particular mentalizing problems in different PDs.…”

“…M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 4 have poor access to own and others states of mind on a more general basis, in part related to poor awareness and tolerance of affects [24][25][26].…”

“…Studies of psychological mindedness and alexithymia tend to show that patients with poor abilities to understand the psychological meaning underlying emotional experiences and behaviors in self and others may have a less favorable outcome [38,39]. Given that RF, psychological mindedness and alexithymia are closely related through processes concerning recognition and thinking about one's own or other's internal states [25], such results point towards RF as a potential predictor of clinical course. Yet, although therapies addressing mentalizing deficits seem to reduce self-harm, general symptoms, interpersonal distress, and personality pathology in patients with BPD [21,[40][41][42][43], few studies have examined whether M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 5 mentalizing capacities at the onset of treatment predict clinical outcome in patients with PDs.…”

Alexithymia in adolescents with borderline personality disorder

“…No significant association was found between alexithymia and the BPD dimension score. Recently, Nicolo et al [15] explored the relationships between alexithymia and personality disorders in a sample of 388 adults and adolescents requiring psychiatric treatment in an outpatient clinic. Alexithymia was assessed with the TAS-20 and personality disorders were rated using the SCID-II for DSM-IV.…”

Measuring Alexithymia via Trait Approach-I: A Alexithymia Scale Item Selection and Formation of Factor Structure

“…Similarly, many studies have reported associations between this construct and state and trait anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychopathology, and personality disorders (57,58,59,60,61). It is important to understand the relationship between the construct and the disorders to control the risk factors and thus prevent the disorders (4,50).…”