آلکسیتیمیا و تفاوت های فردی در بیان هیجانی

Two studies examined verbal and nonverbal expression in relation to facets of alexithymia. Participants were videotaped while they talked about negative and positive events that had happened to them. Persons high in difficulty identifying feelings were less emotionally expressive, nonverbally, of positive emotion during a positive talk, and of negative emotion during a negative talk. Other facets of alexithymia were not independently related to expressiveness. Verbal expressiveness was not independently related to any facet of alexithymia. Study 2 showed that these relationships were independent of whether the participant was alone or with another. The implications for the understanding of the nature of the deficit in alexithymia, and of the effects of disclosure are discussed.

The term alexithymia was coined by Sifneos (1972) to describe the characteristics of “psychosomatic” patients, namely diminished fantasy, a tendency to describe at length details of external reality, such as physical ailments, without referring to their inner, emotional impact, and difficulties in verbally expressing their emotions ( Nemiah & Sifneos, 1970). Bagby, Taylor, Parker, and Dickens (2006) showed that alexithymia comprises two general deficits, each with two facets: reduced affective awareness, shown as the facets difficulty in identifying feelings and difficulty in describing feelings to others; and operative thinking, a cognitive style characterized by externally oriented thinking and reduced imaginal processes. The underlying issue in alexithymia has been characterized as a deficit in the symbolization of emotion ( Nemiah & Sifneos, 1970), or in the processing and regulation of emotion ( Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997). Elevated levels of alexithymia have been found to be associated with a wide variety of disturbances in physical and mental health (see Quinton & Wagner, 2005), although Lumley (2004) has argued that they are related to illness behavior rather than to disease processes.

The two studies have shown that difficulty identifying feelings is inversely related to expressive facial behavior. Averaging the partial correlations from the two studies shows that for positive talks the direct relation between DIF and facial expressiveness is r(90) = −.40, p < .0001, while for negative talks it is r(90) = −.30, p = .004 (two-tailed). This confirms and extends some of the previous research described in the Introduction. McDonald and Prkachin, 1990, Troisi et al., 1996 and Näätanen et al., 1999 found nonverbal expressiveness to be adversely affected by overall alexithymia. Like Troisi et al. we found this relationship particularly (only) for the difficulty identifying feelings subscale. It remains unclear why three other studies have failed to find a link between nonverbal expressiveness and alexithymia, despite using similar methods. Roedema and Simons (1999), like Näätanen et al. (1999), assessed expressive behavior with EMG measures, while Berenbaum and Irvin, 1996 and Luminet et al., 2004, like Troisi et al. (1996) and our experiments, used observer ratings. Berenbaum and Irvin used anger provocation, which is comparable to Näätänen et al.’s use of stress. Roedema and Simons’ use of slide stimuli is comparable to McDonald and Prkachin’s stimuli in their spontaneous condition. We postulated that inconsistencies in results might be due in part to the failure of previous studies to distinguish communication from spontaneous expression. However, we have found no evidence to support this suggestion.