Alexithymia and emotional regulation: A cluster analytical approach

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Jin Jing¹  Jie Chen²  Raymond CK Chan³  Ting Xu⁴ 

[1] Department of Maternal and Child Health, school of Public Health, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China;Department of Maternal and Child Health, school of Public Health, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China;Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China;Mental Health Education & Counseling Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, P.R. China;Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China;Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China;Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China;

关键词: Emotional Regulation;    Cognitive Style;    Chinese Version;    Cluster Solution;    Alexithymia;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-11-33

 received in 2010-11-08, accepted in 2011-02-23,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAlexithymia has been a familiar conception of psychosomatic phenomenon. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there were subtypes of alexithymia associating with different traits of emotional expression and regulation among a group of healthy college students.Methods1788 healthy college students were administered with the Chinese version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and another set of questionnaires assessing emotion status and regulation. A hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted on the three factor scores of the TAS-20. The cluster solution was cross-validated by the corresponding emotional regulation.ResultsThe results indicated there were four subtypes of alexithymia, namely extrovert-high alexithymia (EHA), general-high alexithymia (GHA), introvert-high alexithymia (IHA) and non-alexithymia (NA). The GHA was characterized by general high scores on all three factors, the IHA was characterized by high scores on difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings but low score on externally oriented cognitive style of thinking, the EHA was characterized by high score on externally oriented cognitive style of thinking but normal score on the others, and the NA got low score on all factors. The GHA and IHA were dominant by suppressive character of emotional regulation and expression with worse emotion status as compared to the EHA and NA.ConclusionsThe current findings suggest there were four subtypes of alexithymia characterized by different emotional regulation manifestations.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Chen et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.