Very little research with adolescents has examined the extent that alexithymia is distinctive from other potentially overlapping self-evaluative traits, or the extent that it is related to social and emotional well-being. Teenagers in Grade 8 (N = 796) completed self-report measures of alexithymia, self-esteem, trait hope, social support, and emotional well-being. Teachers also rated each student’s level of emotional and behavioural adjustment. Factor analysis showed that alexithymia was distinguishable from the other self-evaluative traits as well as from the positive and negative affective states. Correlation analyses found that alexithymia was associated with lower quantity and quality of social support, lower positive affect, and higher negative affect, even when controlling for self-esteem and trait hope. These findings have important implications for the assessment and consequences of alexithymia in adolescents.
Some individuals are incapable of identifying their emotions. Sifneos (1973) was the first to label this problem “alexithymia”, which literally means having no words for feelings. Since then, researchers have employed related terms, such as “emotion perception” (Ciarrochi, Chan, & Bajgar, 2001), “emotional awareness” (Rieffe et al., 2007), “emotional clarity” (Salovey, Stroud, Woolery, & Epel, 2002), and “mood labelling” (Swinkels & Giuliano, 1995). These different terms appear to reflect a similar underlying construct (Gohm & Clore, 2000). We prefer to use the original term, namely, alexithymia.
Amongst adults, empirical evidence suggests that alexithymia is related to a wide range of psychological problems including, for example, poor emotion regulation strategies and higher rates of somatic illness and disease (Taylor, 2000), substance abuse (Kauhanen, Kaplan, Julkunen, Wilson, & Salonen, 1993), and social and interpersonal problems (Spitzer, Siebel-Jurges, Barnow, Grabe, & Freyberger, 2005) to mention a few. Very little research has examined alexithymia in childhood and adolescence. This is unfortunate as a better understanding of alexithymia during the adolescent years will better inform interventions with young people thus obviating problems in adulthood. Additionally, there is no evidence regarding the extent to which, among adolescent samples, alexithymia is distinguishable from other constructs such as self-esteem.
The few studies that have explored alexithymia in younger age groups have used similar measures as those for adults and shown that it links to poor socio-emotional and physical outcomes such as obesity (Baldaro et al., 2003), the experience of posttraumatic responses following medical treatments (Fukunishi, Tsuruta, Hirabayashi, & Asukai, 2001), and greater dissociative tendencies (Sayer, Kose, Grabe, & Topbas, 2005). A recent longitudinal study demonstrated that alexithymia was predictive of poor socio-emotional outcomes 1 year later (Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Supavadeeprasit, 2008). In contrast, adolescents with low levels of alexithymia tend to display lower rates of anxiety and depression and report higher satisfaction with life (Extremera, Duran, & Rey, 2007). Quite surprisingly, no studies have examined whether and to what extent adolescents are able to distinguish alexithymia from other self-evaluative measures.
