Dental anxiety and alexithymia; research on anxiety acquisition

Abstract

People with alexithymia have difficulty identifying and describing feelings, have little imagination and mental processes largely orientated towards facts and less towards inner experience. It occurs in about 1 in 10 people and therefore in the dental office, too. A positive association has been found between alexithymia and the development of dental anxiety. With the help of an anxiety-conditioning experiment, the acquisition and the extinction of anxiety can be studied. To gain more knowledge about these processes of acquisition in people with alexithymia, such an experiment was conducted among 32 people with severe dental anxiety, 13 of whom with (possible) alexithymia. Relatively little anxiety conditioning occurred during the experiment. This may be explained by the aversive stimulus and the context in which the experiment was conducted. However, it emerged that for people with alexithymia, a physical outcome measure may be a better indicator of anxiety than a subjective score on a visual analogue scale.