Abstract
Alexithymia’s relation to low awareness of emotion is well-documented: Low self-awareness and the externally oriented thinking style of alexithymia may reflect avoidance of unwanted experiences, a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. The role that this plays in the association between alexithymia and emotional disorders, including social anxiety, needs to be further explicated. This investigation, examined a) the association between alexithymia and two indices of low awareness of internal experiences, namely low private self-consciousness and experiential avoidance, and between alexithymia and avoidant emotion regulation, specifically suppression b) the hypothesis that low self-awareness (experiential avoidance, low private self-consciousness and suppression) mediates the association between alexithymia and social anxiety, in two student samples. Results indicated, as predicted, that alexithymia is associated with low private self-consciousness, high experiential avoidance and greater use of suppression. The association between alexithymia and social anxiety was mediated through experiential avoidance and partially through low private self-consciousness and suppression. Results suggest that low self-awareness in alexithymia may be related to increased avoidance of internal experiences, which may play a protective role in the short term, but in the long run may contribute to the link between alexithymia and mental health problems.
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Notes
Alternative factor structures of the TAS-20 were compared in the current sample, using Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The bifactor model with one general and three specific factors best fit the data, as expected. These results are presented in Supplementary Table 1.
Although the magnitude of the bivariate correlations between alexithymia factors and experiential avoidance is large, it does not suggest that the two measures are assessing the same construct. To ensure that the two constructs are indeed distinct and can be included in the proposed mediation models, we tested two CFA models: Model 1 included all TAS-20 items and all AAQ-II items loading on one latent factor reflecting a single construct that would include both alexithymia and experiential avoidance. The fit indices for Model 1 are as follows: χ2 = 1644.43, df = 324, p < .001, CFI = .597, RMSEA = .114 [.109, .120], SRMR = .103, AIC = 1752.432. Model 2 included two latent inter-correlated factors, all TAS 20 items loaded on one factor, and all AAQ-II items loaded on the other. Thus, it assumes that the two constructs are related but distinct. The fit indices of Model 2 are as follows: χ2 = 1467.04, df = 323, p < .001, CFI = .651, RMESA = .107 [.101, .112], SRMR = .099, AIC = 1577.04. Although neither model showed good fit, the improvement in the fit from Model 1 to Model 2, Δχ2 = 177.39 for 1 degree of freedom, is significant (p < .001), which provides evidence that alexithymia and experiential avoidance form two distinct but inter-correlated latent factors (r = .649, p < .001).
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Panayiotou, G., Leonidou, C., Constantinou, E. et al. Self-Awareness in alexithymia and associations with social anxiety. Curr Psychol 39, 1600–1609 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9855-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9855-1