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Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language

OBJECTIVE: We examined developmental aspects of the emotional awareness of adolescents by evaluating their responses to a self-reported questionnaire based on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20). METHODS: The items of the TAS-20 were modified to make them more understandable by adolescents, an...

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Autores principales: Nishimura, Hiroki, Komaki, Gen, Igarashi, Tetsuya, Moriguchi, Yoshiya, Kajiwara, Sohei, Akasaka, Toru
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2009
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2777913/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19886981
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1751-0759-3-12
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author Nishimura, Hiroki
Komaki, Gen
Igarashi, Tetsuya
Moriguchi, Yoshiya
Kajiwara, Sohei
Akasaka, Toru
author_facet Nishimura, Hiroki
Komaki, Gen
Igarashi, Tetsuya
Moriguchi, Yoshiya
Kajiwara, Sohei
Akasaka, Toru
author_sort Nishimura, Hiroki
collection PubMed
description OBJECTIVE: We examined developmental aspects of the emotional awareness of adolescents by evaluating their responses to a self-reported questionnaire based on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20). METHODS: The items of the TAS-20 were modified to make them more understandable by adolescents, and nine new items related to a limited capacity for imagination were added. The Japanese Linguistic Ability Test and the multi-dimensional empathy scale for adolescents were administered to examine concurrent validity. Two hundred and two normative young adolescents and thirty-two adolescent patients with psychosomatic and/or behavioral problems participated in the study. Eighty junior high school students also participated in a separate examination of test-retest reliability. RESULTS: Thirteen items were extracted after exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and four core factors were identified in the resulting scale: Difficulty Identifying Feelings (DIF), Difficulty Describing Feelings (DDF), Externally-Oriented Thinking (EOT) and Constricted Imaginal Capacities (CIC). Interestingly, scores on the multi-dimensional empathy scale correlated positively with DIF and DDF, but negatively with EOT and CIC. Higher DDF scores were associated with higher Japanese linguistic abilities. DIF/DDF scores were higher for females than males, irrespective of linguistic ability. Test-retest reliability coefficients were significant. The patient group showed significantly higher DIF scores than the normative students. CONCLUSION: The present findings indicated that subjective difficulties in identifying and describing feelings are associated with empathetic and linguistic abilities. The developmental aspect to emotional awareness herein described suggests that self-reported questionnaires for alexithymia must be carefully constructed and examined, even for adults.
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spelling pubmed-27779132009-11-17 Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language Nishimura, Hiroki Komaki, Gen Igarashi, Tetsuya Moriguchi, Yoshiya Kajiwara, Sohei Akasaka, Toru Biopsychosoc Med Research OBJECTIVE: We examined developmental aspects of the emotional awareness of adolescents by evaluating their responses to a self-reported questionnaire based on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20). METHODS: The items of the TAS-20 were modified to make them more understandable by adolescents, and nine new items related to a limited capacity for imagination were added. The Japanese Linguistic Ability Test and the multi-dimensional empathy scale for adolescents were administered to examine concurrent validity. Two hundred and two normative young adolescents and thirty-two adolescent patients with psychosomatic and/or behavioral problems participated in the study. Eighty junior high school students also participated in a separate examination of test-retest reliability. RESULTS: Thirteen items were extracted after exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and four core factors were identified in the resulting scale: Difficulty Identifying Feelings (DIF), Difficulty Describing Feelings (DDF), Externally-Oriented Thinking (EOT) and Constricted Imaginal Capacities (CIC). Interestingly, scores on the multi-dimensional empathy scale correlated positively with DIF and DDF, but negatively with EOT and CIC. Higher DDF scores were associated with higher Japanese linguistic abilities. DIF/DDF scores were higher for females than males, irrespective of linguistic ability. Test-retest reliability coefficients were significant. The patient group showed significantly higher DIF scores than the normative students. CONCLUSION: The present findings indicated that subjective difficulties in identifying and describing feelings are associated with empathetic and linguistic abilities. The developmental aspect to emotional awareness herein described suggests that self-reported questionnaires for alexithymia must be carefully constructed and examined, even for adults. BioMed Central 2009-11-03 /pmc/articles/PMC2777913/ /pubmed/19886981 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1751-0759-3-12 Text en Copyright © 2009 Nishimura et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Nishimura, Hiroki
Komaki, Gen
Igarashi, Tetsuya
Moriguchi, Yoshiya
Kajiwara, Sohei
Akasaka, Toru
Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title_full Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title_fullStr Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title_full_unstemmed Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title_short Validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
title_sort validity issues in the assessment of alexithymia related to the developmental stages of emotional cognition and language
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2777913/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19886981
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1751-0759-3-12
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