A pilot study on alexithymia in adopted youths: prevalence and relationships with emotional-behavioral problems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adopted adolescents show high rates of emotional-behavioral problems and they could also be more vulnerable to alexithymia, a risk factor for psychopathology in adolescents, that is more frequent in case of early relational trauma(s), often experienced by adoptees in pre-adoption life. However, no studies investigate alexithymia in adopted adolescents, therefore this pilot study aimed to: (a) assess the prevalence of alexithymia in adoptees in comparison with a national representative sample; (b) examine the relationships between alexithymia and emotional-behavioral problems in adoptees. Participants were 33 adoptees aged 10-19 years (54.5% boys), enrolled through social services. Measures were the self-report questionnaire Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20-item to measure participants’ alexithymia, and the Youth Self Report 11-18 years to assess emotional-behavioral problems. Main results highlighted: 1) 71% of adoptees with moderate-to-high levels of alexithymia, with adoptees as significantly more border-alexithymic (55%) than in normative peers; 2) Alexithymia and its factors Difficulty to identifying Feelings and Externally Oriented Thinking were related to more total, internalizing, externalizing and other problems (social, attentional, thought, binge-drinking, substance abuse, suicidality, etc...); 3) The difficulty identifying feelings was the unique predictor for 38% of total problems, 40% of internalizing ones, 22% of externalizing ones and 30% of other problems. In conclusion, the results suggest the clinical and scientific relevance of continuing the study of alexithymia in adopted adolescents, and future directions of research are suggested.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".