Alexithymia and emotional processing: a longitudinal mixed methods research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexithymia has been associated with poor outcomes in psychotherapy. This association has been attributed to a difficulty in patients processing emotions and engaging in emotional tasks. The possibility of alexithymia being modified by psychotherapy remains a topic of great debate but with little empirical research. In this study a mixed methods longitudinal design was used to better understand alexithymia, emotional processing and change process in psychotherapy. Twelve clients, five with alexithymia, were studied considering the development of alexithymia, emotional awareness, differentiation, regulation and severity of symptoms. The reliable change index was used to interpret the evolution of those emotional variables' scores for each case and thematic analysis was used to analyze individual interviews. Thematic analysis generated several themes, organized in two broad domains: i) perception of emotions and ii) description of change. The three alexithymic patients that changed in alexithymia also changed in at least one of the emotional variables - lack of emotional awareness, emotion differentiation or emotion regulation. Generally, alexithymic patients were able to accomplish change in psychotherapy although they had a tendency to focus on physical complaints, describe changes in a more rational rather than emotional way and present vaguer descriptions of their problems. These results point that alexithymia may change through therapy and reinforces that those changes are associated with improved emotional processing.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".