The Relationship of Alexithymia with Social Phobia among Female Students at the University of Hafr Al-Batin

Abstract

Objectives: This study aimed to identify the relationship of alexithymia with social phobia among a sample of female students at the University of Hafr Al-Batin.
 Methods: The descriptive correlative approach was used in this study to reveal the relationship of alexithymia with social phobia among a sample of female students at the University of Hafr Al-Batin, consisting of (200) female university students from various disciplines and academic levels, where the Social Anxiety Scale (SAS) consisted of (24) items distributed on (3) main dimensions: interaction anxiety, performance anxiety, and evaluation anxiety. And the alexithymia scale (Tas20) consisted of (15) items divided into (3) dimensions: the difficulty of recognizing feelings, the difficulty of describing feelings, and externally directed thinking were used in this study.
 Results: The results of the study indicated the existence of a positive relationship between alexithymia and social phobia among female students at the University of Hafr Al-Batin, where the relationship ratio between them was (0.614), The explained difference in the relationship between the two measures was (0.38), which is a ratio that indicates the percentage of explaining the variance in the relationship between the two measures.
 Conclusions: Conducting more studies about alexithymia and its relationship to other variables (such as psychological adjustment, and psychological hardness), conducting more studies on other samples, and measuring the effect of accompanying variables such as gender, age, academic level, etc., in addition to applying other measures of social phobia and alexithymia to reveal the extent to which the variables relate to each other.