A Longitudinal Examination of the Predictive Effects of Alexithymia on Nonsuicidal Self‐Injury Among Emerging Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Emerging evidence suggests that alexithymia, a psychological construct defined by the inability to describe emotion, differentiate feelings, and think in an internally oriented way, may be relevant in understanding engagement in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). However, there is a paucity of longitudinal work on alexithymia and NSSI, which is necessary to discern whether alexithymia may heighten risk for NSSI over time. METHODS: In the present study, the association between alexithymia and NSSI was examined among 1125 emerging adults (Mage = 17.96, 72% female), who completed a survey at two time points 4 months apart. RESULTS: Participants with a history of NSSI reported higher levels of alexithymia than those with no NSSI engagement. A zero-inflated negative binomial regression model revealed that higher alexithymia at Time 1 predicted greater diversity in NSSI methods (i.e., NSSI versatility), but not NSSI frequency, at Time 2, for those already engaging in NSSI (p < 0.01, controlling for NSSI history at Time 1, emotion regulation difficulties, age, and gender). Significant differences were found in NSSI functions based on alexithymia among individuals with a lifetime history of NSSI at both time points. Among participants with a history of NSSI, alexithymia was most strongly correlated with anti-dissociation, sensation seeking, self-punishment, toughness, and interpersonal boundaries NSSI functions. CONCLUSION: Findings underscore that alexithymia may be relevant to understanding NSSI severity.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".