BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception

    Brewer, Rebecca and Cook, Richard and Bird, Geoffrey (2016) Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception. Royal Society Open Science , ISSN 2054-5703.

    [img] Text
    Brewer et al (2016) RSOS alex.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (508kB)
    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    21298.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (535kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Alexithymia is a sub-clinical construct, traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying and describing one's own emotions. Despite the clear need for interoception (interpreting physical signals from the body) when identifying one's own emotions, little research has focused on the selectivity of this impairment. While it was originally assumed that the interoceptive deficit in alexithymia is specific to emotion, recent evidence suggests that alexithymia may also be associated with difficulties perceiving some non-affective interoceptive signals, such as one's heart rate. It is therefore possible that the impairment experienced by those with alexithymia is common to all aspects of interoception, such as interpreting signals of hunger, arousal, proprioception, tiredness and temperature. In order to determine whether alexithymia is associated with selectively impaired affective interoception, or general interoceptive impairment, we investigated the association between alexithymia and self-reported non-affective interoceptive ability, and the extent to which individuals perceive similarity between affective and non-affective states (both measured using questionnaires developed for the purpose of the current study), in both typical individuals (n = 105 (89 female), mean age = 27.5 years) and individuals reporting a diagnosis of a psychiatric condition (n = 103 (83 female), mean age = 31.3 years). Findings indicated that alexithymia was associated with poor non-affective interoception and increased perceived similarity between affective and non-affective states, in both the typical and clinical populations. We therefore suggest that rather than being specifically associated with affective impairment, alexithymia is better characterized by a general failure of interoception.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Richard Cook
    Date Deposited: 22 Feb 2018 08:10
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:39
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/21298

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    345Downloads
    6 month trend
    231Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item