Abstract
The long-standing hypothesis that emotions rely on bodily states is back in the spotlight. This has led some researchers to suggest that alexithymia, a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, reflects a general deficit in interoception. However, tests of this hypothesis have relied on heterogeneous assessment methods, leading to inconsistent results. To shed some light on this issue, we administered a battery of self-report questionnaires of interoception and alexithymia to three samples from Italy, the U.S., and Singapore (N = 814). Correlation and machine learning analyses showed that alexithymia was associated with deficits in both subjective interoceptive accuracy and attention. Alexithymics’ interoceptive deficits were primarily related to difficulty identifying and describing feelings. Interoception showed a weaker association with externally-oriented thinking as operationalized by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and no association with the affective dimension of alexithymia later introduced by the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ). We discuss our results with reference to the theoretical and psychometric differences between these two measures of alexithymia and their shortcomings. Overall, our results support the view that interoceptive deficits are a core component of alexithymia, although the latter cannot be reduced to the former.
Highlights
A long standing philosophical and psychological tradition has argued that somatic sensations play a role in the experience of emotions
We reported comparative analyses of variance of the samples’ sociodemographic and psychological measures, the main aim of this study was not to compare the samples with each other but to verify whether our results were consistent across different socio-demographic profiles
Our attempt to clarify the relationship between alexithymia and interoception went in two directions
Summary
A long standing philosophical and psychological tradition has argued that somatic sensations play a role in the experience of emotions Suffice it to mention the famous subtraction argument proposed by James and Lange [1, 2], who asked us to imagine experiencing a strong emotion without any of the feelings of the corresponding bodily symptoms. Their intuitions about the essential role of bodily feelings in the identification of emotions have received renewed attention because they are consistent with theories of embodied cognition [3] and the work of neuroscientists like Damasio [4] Proponents of these approaches argue that experiencing somatic changes is a prerequisite for emotional experience.
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