Validity of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) in an Inpatient Population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This archival study sought to investigate the construct validity of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) when used with an inpatient clinical population. The TAS-20 is a self-report instrument that measures alexithymia, a psychological construct that encompasses 4 main cognitive traits: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings to others, externally oriented thinking, and a limited imaginal capacity. Seven separate studies were employed: Study 1 explored internal consistency; Study 2 explored factor structure; Study 3 explored criterion-based predictive validity; Study 4 explored convergent validity; Study 5 explored discriminant validity; and Studies 6 and 7 explored the relationship between TAS-20 scores and Axis I and Axis II diagnoses. The participants were 169 inpatients at a state mental hospital in the Southeast. Participants were administered the TAS-20 while participating in the hospital's Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) program between 2002 and 2011. Study results revealed a reliability coefficient of .793 and a two factor solution. However, subsequent analyses revealed that removal of the reverse score items increased internal consistency and that the best solution was a 1 factor solution with the TAS-20 reverse scored items removed. TAS-20 scores were found to be weakly predictive of both self-harm and acting-out behavioral incidents. A significant, but weak, positive correlation was found between TAS-20 scores and a measure of trauma. There was no significant relationship found between TAS-20 scores and a measure of verbal IQ. No relationship was found between TAS-20 scores and either Axis I or II diagnoses. Overall, the research findings provided weak support for the construct validity of the TAS-20 when used with a severely mentally ill inpatient population. Due to its questionable construct validity, the TAS-20 should be used with inpatient clinical populations in conjunction with other alexithymia measures, clinical interviews and behavioral observations. Because of the TAS-20's cost effectiveness and ease of use, further refinement of the items of the TAS-20 is recommended along with further research on the construct validity of a modified instrument.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".