Finding words for feelings: The relationship between personality disorders and alexithymia

Abstract

This study examined whether personality disorders (PDs) are associated with alexithymic features at varying levels of comorbid psychopathology distress. 167 psychiatric outpatients completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and the General Severity Index (GSI) of the SCL90-revised. Bootstrapping analyses were performed to test whether the PD/alexithymia relationship was moderated by psychopathology distress (GSI). The overall number of PD criteria was associated with cognitive aspects of alexithymia (i.e., Externally Oriented Thinking, EOT) only at low/moderate levels of distress. Borderline criteria predicted EOT only when distress was low, while avoidant and dependent criteria were independently related with EOT. No association was found between other PDs and alexithymia facets. Thus, within clinical samples the alexithymia/PD association is mainly explained by comorbid psychopathology; however, individuals with avoidant, dependent and borderline features might have a specific difficulty with focusing on internal reality, even when their current symptom distress is low

Self-Knowledge in Personality Disorders: An Emotion-Focused Perspective

“…Ogrodniczuk, Piper and Joyce (2011) showed that across samples with personality disorders, clients had a deficit in their ability to adequately symbolize emotional experience. Furthermore, an experimental study demonstrated the link EMOTIONAL SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN PERSONALITY DISORDERS 21 between PDs and alexithymia is partially independent from the actual symptom load: even among clients with PDs who have rather low symptom levels present with alexithymic features, speaking towards a central feature of emotional knowledge processes in these clients (De Panfilis, Ossola, Tonna, Catania, & Marchesi, 2015). Clients with such alexithymic features may still describe emotions, but in a non-differentiated way, sometimes even despite their being "high-arousal" states, consistent with what has been called global distress (Pascual-Leone, 2009).…”

Alexithymia and Emotional Processing: A Mediation Model

“…Although initially linked to psychosomatic disorders, alexithymia was soon identified in a number of other conditions, such as eating disorders (e.g., Petterson, 2004), substance abuse and dependence (e.g., Speranza et. al., 2004), anxiety disorders and depression (e.g., Zeitlan & Mcnally, 1993;Li, Zhang, Guo, & Zhang, 2015), posttraumatic stress disorder (e.g., Brady, Bujarski, Feldner, & Pyne, 2016), personality disorders (e.g., De Panfilis, Ossola, Tonna, Catania, Marchesi, 2015), as well as autism spectrum disorders, particularly Asperger' syndrome (e.g., Fitzgerald & Molyneux, 2004). It should be noted that alexithymia does not appear to be a substantive feature of any of these disorders, but instead a related comorbid condition (Taylor, 1984).…”

The role of alexithymia in predicting incident depression in patients at first acute coronary syndrome

“…In the second hypothesis, the relationship between alexithymia and depression may represent an artifact of the method and measures used [63], since, particularly the TAS-20 dimensions DIF and DDF are associated with different measures of negative affects [15,16,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63]. Therefore, individuals with negative emotional states (i.e.…”