Alexithymia in schizophrenia

Abstract

Changes in emotional and social behavior are considered to be amongst the most common and debilitating consequences of schizophrenia. However, little is known of the effects of schizophrenia on alexithymia, which refers to impairment in aspects of understanding emotions. In the current study, participants with schizophrenia (n = 29) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) completed self-report and performance-based measures of this construct, in addition to measures of cognitive functioning, clinical symptomatology, and negative affect. The results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia showed increased alexithymia as indexed by the performance task, with these difficulties related to cognitive functioning, and the specific clinical symptom of alogia. However, although the correlation between self-reported alexithymia and negative affect in the schizophrenia group was congruent with prior empirical research and theory, there were no group differences in perceived levels of alexithymia. It is suggested that alexithymia may not be affected per se in schizophrenia (as indicated by the lack of group differences on the self-report measure of this construct), but that schizophrenia-related difficulties do emerge in contexts where cognitive demands are incremented.

Keywords:

• Schizophrenia
• Alexithymia
• Psychopathology
• Cognitive dysfunction
• Emotional awareness

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. The authors acknowledge the Schizophrenia Research Institute for assisting with the recruitment of the volunteers participating in this research, as well as the participants themselves. The authors have no financial or other relationships that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest affecting this manuscript.

Notes

¹ These composite scores were derived by adding together the five global negative symptom scores and four global positive symptom scores, each of which were rated out of 5. Consequently, scores of 8.0 (out of a possible 25) and 4.6 (out of a possible 20) are equivalent to mean global scores of 1.6 and 0.9 for negative and positive symptoms, respectively. This indicates that, on average, negative symptoms were in the questionable to mild range, and positive symptoms were in the questionable range.