Alexithymia and its influence on perceived social support, stress, and help-seeking attitudes in men undergoing radical prostatectomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Men undergoing radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer often exhibit reluctance to seek professional psychological help. Emerging evidence suggests that alexithymia, a personality trait characterized by difficulties in identifying and expressing emotions-may contribute to this reluctance by impairing emotional processing and interpersonal functioning. However, the relationships among alexithymia, perceived social support, perceived stress, and help-seeking attitudes remain insufficiently explored in this population. This study aims to examine the influence of alexithymia on these key psychosocial factors in men with prostate cancer. METHODS: A total of 430 men who had undergone radical prostatectomy, with a mean age of 69.92 ± 4.71 years, were recruited for the study. Participants completed a series of standardized questionnaires, including a demographic survey, the Normative Male Alexithymia Scale-Brief Form, the Perceived Social Support Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, and the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale-Short Form. RESULTS: Higher levels of alexithymia were significantly associated with lower perceived social support and more negative attitudes toward seeking psychological help. Alexithymia was also positively correlated with higher levels of perceived stress. Furthermore, perceived social support and perceived stress were identified as statistically significant mediators in the relationship between alexithymia and help-seeking attitudes. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the psychological impact of alexithymia on perceived social support, stress levels, and attitudes toward seeking psychological help among men recovering from prostate cancer surgery. The findings underscore the importance of addressing emotional processing difficulties in the development of interventions aimed at improving psychological adjustment and promoting mental health service utilization in this population.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".