Latent structure of the alexithymia construct: a taxometric investigation

Abstract

Despite a wealth of research on the validity of alexithymia and its association with a number of common medical and psychiatric disorders, the fundamental question of whether alexithymia is best conceptualized as a dimensional or categorical construct remains unresolved. In the current investigation, taxometric analysis is used to examine the nature of the latent structure of alexithymia. Several nonredundant taxometric procedures were performed with item sets from the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (R. M. Bagby, J. D. A. Parker, & G. J. Taylor, 1994) as indicators. These procedures were applied separately in large community (n = 1,933) and undergraduate (n = 1,948) samples and in a smaller sample of psychiatric outpatients (n = 302). The results across various taxometric procedures and the different samples provide strong support that alexithymia is a dimensional construct. Some theoretical implications of these findings for research on the alexithymia construct are discussed.