“Why can't I say people's names?” Alexinomia as a widespread psychological phenomenon

Abstract

Psychological research has recently proposed alexinomia, characterised by an inhibited behaviour in saying names, as a distinct psychosocial phenomenon. Alexinomia is associated with anxiety and avoidance behaviours with regards to saying names and thus severely impacts every day social interactions and relationships. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of this newly established and poorly understood psychological phenomenon and to further determine its impact on everyday life. For this purpose, online advice and discussion forums were systematically searched for threads on and mentions of problems with saying names. We analysed a broad dataset from English-language comments discussing alexinomia-related experiences and behaviours, inclusive of varied demographics and geographical regions. The findings based on the qualitative analysis of 257 unique sources show that alexinomia is a widespread phenomenon. Moreover, the analysed online materials showed affected individual's use of a variety of effective and ineffective coping strategies and experience varying degrees of severity, which can potentially diminish with training. The study's results therefore highlight alexinomia as a relevant, yet highly under researched, field of study, and add to our knowledge on the experience of alexinomia in everyday life and its potential origins, especially relating to social anxiety and early-life familial dynamic.