Assessing alexithymia for positive and negative emotions: the role of granularity and dialecticism

Alexithymia is a transdiagnostic factor for the development and maintenance of psychological symptomatology. Strongly tied to particularities in emotion regulation, recent theorizations consider the difficulties describing and identifying feelings dimensions of alexithymia to influence the appraisal stage of emotional processing. This study aimed at replicating and extending findings from Aaron et al., 2018 by focusing on differentiating alexithymia for positive and negative emotions. Participants (n=125, mean age 45 y.o; 74% women) evaluated their emotional experience after watching videos inducing anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness. Alexithymia was measured by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ). No association between alexithymia and positive emotional complexity was observed despite the use of the PAQ assessing alexithymia for positive emotions. Difficulties describing and identifying negative feelings from PAQ were predicted by lower negative granularity. Difficulties describing feelings from both scales were predicted by higher negative dialecticism. These results confirm the association between alexithymia facets and emotional complexity regarding negative emotions and emphasize the importance of controlling for negative affect in alexithymia studies. Finally, high alexithymia was characterized by higher reporting of negative affective states compared to positives states following positive induction, which questions the interpretation of dialecticism in alexithymia.