A longitudinal mediational study on the stability of alexithymia among alcohol-dependent outpatients in cognitive–behavioral therapy.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexithymia is characterized by difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and an externally oriented thinking style. Alexithymia has been described as a trait-like risk factor for the development of alcohol use disorders. Few studies have investigated the absolute (whether mean scores change over time) and relative (extent to which relative differences among individuals remain the same over time) stability of alexithymia among men and women with alcohol dependence, or have considered potential underlying mechanisms. Social learning processes contribute to and maintain alcohol problems. The reinforcement of alcohol expectancies is one plausible mechanism that links the difficulties in emotional processing associated with alexithymia and alcohol use. The present study investigated the stability of alexithymia as well as alcohol expectancy as a mediator of alexithymia. Three hundred fifty-five alcohol-dependent patients were enrolled in a cognitive behavioral treatment program. Ninety-two alcohol-dependent patients completed assessments at baseline and at 3-month follow-up. Results indicated that total Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994) mean score, difficulty identifying feelings, and difficulty describing feelings decreased significantly over time with a larger decrease in alexithymia mean scores for females. Externally oriented thinking mean scores did not change. The TAS-20 and its subfactors demonstrated significant correlations, from baseline to follow-up, which were stronger for males than for females. Regression analyses showed that the total TAS-20 mean scores, difficulty identifying feelings, and difficulty describing feelings were partially mediated through assertion alcohol expectancies. In conclusion, this suggests that alexithymia has relative stability and is a trait-like factor among alcohol-dependent treatment seekers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".