تئوری پردازش آلکسی تایمیا

This paper presents a processing theory of alexithymia in terms of failure of report across the components of emotional processing and the nature of explicit and implicit knowledge. The typical features of alexithymia (e.g., failure of cue recognition, flattened expression, inability to articulate emotional states) correspond to disruptions at the interfaces of components in emotional processing. The output of various components of emotional processing requires explicit representations in a variety of forms: it is these structured outputs which have suggested to some that alexithymia is a deficit of awareness or of emotional representations in working memory. This combination of information transfer and explicit/implicit knowledge leads to clarifications of the nature of alexithymia, the severity of the syndrome, and methods of measurement and intervention. These insights in turn suggest a broader consideration of alexithymia in terms of the vocabulary of cognitive science.

Alexithymia is a disturbance of the experience and expression of emotions, resulting in flattened or highly restrained affect and lack of awareness of emotions (see, e.g., Taylor, 1984; Lesser, 1985; Sifneos, 1994; Taylor & Taylor, 1997). It was first observed among patients who expressed classical psychosomatic disorders – so-called infantile personalities (Ruesch, 1948) and emotional illiterates (Freedman & Sweet, 1954) – and has since been observed in and associated with a variety of conditions, including post-traumatic stress syndrome, alcoholism, and drug addiction (Krystal, 1968; Rybakowski, Ziolkowski, Zasadska, & Brzezinski, 1988). There remains ongoing debate as to the proper empirical evidence for the condition (Roedema and Simons, 1999) and the best overall theoretical account (compare Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997 with Lane, Ahern, Schwartz, & Kazniak, 1997). Still, decades of research have revealed a number of representative behavioral and cognitive features of the condition:

We hope to have shown how a logical and processing account of alexithymia, fleshed out in some detail and brought into contact with larger issues of mental computation, gives us a better and more useful picture of the condition. Here we want to push this association with computation further and close with arguments that show that casting alexithymia in light of cognitive science opens up new possibilities.