The association between communication impairments and acquired alexithymia in chronic stroke patients

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Language dysfunction has recently been suggested to be one route to alexithymia, an impairment in recognizing and communicating one’s own emotions. Neuropsychological evidence is needed to investigate the possibility that acquired language problems could underlie acquired alexithymia.

Method

This project examined data from a large group of chronic stroke patients (N = 118) to test whether self-reported or behavioral measures of language and communication problems were associated with alexithymia. We also examined the impact of hemisphere of damage on alexithymia.

Results

We found no differences in alexithymia levels for patients with observed language impairments on brief tests of picture naming, comprehension, and reading vs unimpaired patients. However, self-reported communication difficulties were found to be associated with higher scores of alexithymia, even after controlling for depression and anxiety. Patients with left- versus right-hemisphere damage did not differ in their alexithymia scores.

Conclusions

We found partial support for the language hypothesis of alexithymia. We discuss potential reasons for the discrepant findings between the self-report and objective language measures and suggest that self-report measures may be more sensitive to milder, more pragmatic language impairments, as opposed to the severe structural language impairments measured by the cognitive screening tests.

KEYWORDS:

• Acquired brain injury
• language
• emotional awareness
• neuropsychology
• aphasia
• emotional impairments

Acknowledgments

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. This study was supported by the Stroke Association UK (TSA LECT 2015/02) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute for Health Research; Stroke Association UK [TSA LECT 2015/02]; Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.