Self-knowledge assessment in alexithymia

Details

Supervisors

Samson, Dana ; Bukowski, Henryk

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Alexithymia, from Greek, « no word for emotions”, is a personality trait characterized by three distinct facets, namely a difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and an externally oriented thinking mode (Taylor & Bagby, 2004; Taylor et al., 2016). According to the Attention-Appraisal Model, the three facets of alexithymia stem from impairments in various stages of the emotion regulation process (Preece et al., 2017). Self-knowledge, for its part, refers to an aggregation of representations that comprise specific characteristics descriptive of the self (Bukowski, 2019). Given the crucial role of emotions in memory processing of self-relevant information (Brosch et al., 2013; Klein, 2001), affective impairments such as those identified in alexithymia are posited to hinder the development of self-knowledge (Nielson & Correro, 2017; Phelps, 2004; Richter-Levin, 2004). The purpose of this study was thus to investigate the impact of alexithymia on the development and accessibility of self-knowledge. We administered the Battery of Self-Knowledge on our sample, and conducted our analyses on 277 psychology students, assessing their performance in a semantic present-self fluency, a self-complexity and a recognition of self-descriptive adjectives task. Main results revealed marginal effects of alexithymia facets on fluency (DIF and DDF) and on the valence of selected adjectives for self-descriptions (EOT). Although the self-reference effect (Symons & Johnson, 1997) was not impacted by alexithymia, poorer recognition of overall negative adjectives was observed. A specific negative effect of difficulties processing either negative or positive emotions was identified on the recognition of adjectives of similar valance. These findings indicate a functional ability to perceive affective materials related to the self in alexithymia, but potentially obstructed by an emotional avoidance mode. Indeed, as reflected in our study, such coping strategy is highly predominant in this population (e.g., Coriale et al., 2012). Consequently, the specific difficulties in regulating either positive or negative emotions are posited to obstruct the development of self-schemas and impoverish self-knowledge, as suggested by our results. In addition, these findings confirm the existence of deficit in regulating positive emotions, as demonstrated in previous studies (e.g., Zou et al., 2019). Further studies should investigate in more depth the content of generated and selected traits of high alexithymic individuals, beyond their overall performance. Furthermore, other aspects of self-knowledge included in the BOSK should be explored to better understand its organization in alexithymia.