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20‐Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale: Do difficulties describing feelings assess proneness to shame instead of difficulties symbolizing emotions?
Author(s) -
Suslow Thomas,
Donges UtaSusan,
Kersting Anette,
Arolt Volker
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9450.00205
Subject(s) - shame , alexithymia , psychology , feeling , toronto alexithymia scale , scale (ratio) , social psychology , trait , personality , construct (python library) , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , physics , quantum mechanics , computer science , programming language
A hallmark of alexithymia is the difficulty putting emotional states into words which has to be differentiated from problems to communicate emotion to others. Shame proneness is a personality trait that is expected to be closely related to a reduced emotional self‐disclosure in social interactions. The present investigation was conducted to examine construct validity of the Difficulties Describing Feelings scale of the 20‐Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS‐20). The TAS‐20 was administered to 68 subjects (30 psychiatric inpatients and 38 normals) along with the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a direct measure of the ability to express feelings verbally, and the Shame‐Guilt‐Scale. Difficulties Describing Feelings was associated with shame assessing scales but not with guilt assessing scales or the LEAS. Thus, in view of our data one should be cautious in interpreting scores from the TAS‐20 scale Difficulties Describing Feelings as indices of a difficulty to symbolize one’s emotions. Instead, this TAS‐20 scale seems to evaluate aspects of social shame.