Prevalence and correlates of alexithymia in the general population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Alexithymia, the inability to recognize and describe one’s emotions, has been significantly \nassociated with an increased risk of different medical and psychiatric disorders and reduced quality of \nlife. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to assess the prevalence and correlates of alexithymia in a \ncommunity-based sample. Methods: Four hundred subjects (50% males, mean age 41.2 ± 15.3 years, range \n20-70 years, 49.8% married or living as married) completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20), \nthe Symptom Questionnaire (SQ), the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the 15-item version of the \nInterpersonal Support Evaluation List (ISEL-15), and the Brief Coping Orientation to Problems \nExperienced (Brief-COPE). Results: According to the TAS-20 cut-off values, 47 subjects (12%) were \nclassified as “alexithymic”, 60 (15%) as “borderline”, and 293 (73%) as “non-alexithymic”. In multiple \nregression analyses, the TAS-20 “difficulty identifying feelings” subscale was significantly predicted by \nperceived stress, lower social support, and use of denial and self-blame coping strategies, the “difficulty \ndescribing feelings” subscale by lower social support and lower use of the planning coping strategy, and \nthe “externally oriented thinking” subscale by decreased social support, the use of the behavioral \ndisengagement coping strategy, and a lower engagement in the emotional support and self-blame coping \nstrategies. Discussion: These findings highlight a negative impact of alexithymia on the perception and \nmanagement of stressful situations, with a low likelihood of adopting adaptive coping strategies and a \ntendency to engage in avoidant coping strategies. These difficulties in coping with stress may mediate the \nrelationship between alexithymia and vulnerability to medical and psychiatric disorders. The low \nsatisfaction with social support in subjects with higher alexithymia may be explained by the difficulties in \nexpressing their feelings and needs to others, resulting in a decreased likelihood of receiving empathy and \nprosocial behaviors. Psychological interventions for alexithymia should include stress management \ntechniques to enhance adaptive coping strategies and the ability to communicate the need for support. \nFurther studies with a prospective design and an interviewer-based assessment of alexithymia are needed \nto confirm these findings.
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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".