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Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia
BACKGROUND: Emotional divorce occurs when a couple continues to live together due to necessity and coercion but they do not have a positive or constructive relationship, which negatively affects the stability of married life. Due to the low social acceptance of a formal divorce in the Saudi society,...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10398916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37533120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01236-w |
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author | AL-shahrani, Hend Faye Hammad, Mohammad Ahmed |
author_facet | AL-shahrani, Hend Faye Hammad, Mohammad Ahmed |
author_sort | AL-shahrani, Hend Faye |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Emotional divorce occurs when a couple continues to live together due to necessity and coercion but they do not have a positive or constructive relationship, which negatively affects the stability of married life. Due to the low social acceptance of a formal divorce in the Saudi society, emotional divorce is common in several families. The rigidity of feelings and emotions within the family and the inability to express them may indicate the presence of alexithymia, which could result in the collapse of the family system and place the people involved at risk of mental health problems such as depression. Therefore, it is important to determine the prevalence of emotional divorce among married women in Saudi Arabia and to examine the relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia. METHODS: Data were collected from 305 married women in Saudi Arabia (M(age) = 33.24 years; SD(age) = 4.87 years), using the Emotional Divorce Scale and the Alexithymia Scale. RESULTS: Results revealed that 78.36% of the participants experienced moderate to severe levels of emotional divorce. Working women, those who had been married for more than ten years, and those with five or more children exhibited a higher incidence of emotional divorce as compared to their counterparts. A linear regression analysis indicated that alexithymia was significantly associated with emotional divorce in this sample. CONCLUSION: These results suggest the need for examining the negative consequences of emotional divorce on the family and society. Additionally, it is important to educate young individuals of marriageable age about the nature of married life, and ways to deal with problems that occur. Finally, couples should be encouraged to express their positive and negative emotions with their spouse to build the marital relationship, and achieve compatibility and marital satisfaction. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-023-01236-w. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10398916 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-103989162023-08-04 Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia AL-shahrani, Hend Faye Hammad, Mohammad Ahmed BMC Psychol Research BACKGROUND: Emotional divorce occurs when a couple continues to live together due to necessity and coercion but they do not have a positive or constructive relationship, which negatively affects the stability of married life. Due to the low social acceptance of a formal divorce in the Saudi society, emotional divorce is common in several families. The rigidity of feelings and emotions within the family and the inability to express them may indicate the presence of alexithymia, which could result in the collapse of the family system and place the people involved at risk of mental health problems such as depression. Therefore, it is important to determine the prevalence of emotional divorce among married women in Saudi Arabia and to examine the relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia. METHODS: Data were collected from 305 married women in Saudi Arabia (M(age) = 33.24 years; SD(age) = 4.87 years), using the Emotional Divorce Scale and the Alexithymia Scale. RESULTS: Results revealed that 78.36% of the participants experienced moderate to severe levels of emotional divorce. Working women, those who had been married for more than ten years, and those with five or more children exhibited a higher incidence of emotional divorce as compared to their counterparts. A linear regression analysis indicated that alexithymia was significantly associated with emotional divorce in this sample. CONCLUSION: These results suggest the need for examining the negative consequences of emotional divorce on the family and society. Additionally, it is important to educate young individuals of marriageable age about the nature of married life, and ways to deal with problems that occur. Finally, couples should be encouraged to express their positive and negative emotions with their spouse to build the marital relationship, and achieve compatibility and marital satisfaction. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-023-01236-w. BioMed Central 2023-08-02 /pmc/articles/PMC10398916/ /pubmed/37533120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01236-w Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research AL-shahrani, Hend Faye Hammad, Mohammad Ahmed Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title | Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title_full | Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title_fullStr | Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title_full_unstemmed | Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title_short | Relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in Saudi Arabia |
title_sort | relationship between emotional divorce and alexithymia among married women in saudi arabia |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10398916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37533120 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01236-w |
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