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. 2024 Feb 15:347:445-452.
doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.11.038. Epub 2023 Nov 23.

Subscales of alexithymia show unique pathways through reappraisal and suppression to anxiety, depression and stress

Kristen P Morie  1 , Kayla A Lord  2 , Gretchen J Diefenbach  2 , Oishani Basuchoudhary  3 , Stephanie Lewis  3 , Michal Assaf  4
Affiliations

Subscales of alexithymia show unique pathways through reappraisal and suppression to anxiety, depression and stress

Kristen P Morie et al. J Affect Disord. .

Abstract

The goal of this work was to explore associations of constituent factors of alexithymia on mental health and potential mediating effects of emotion regulation strategies, specifically suppression and reappraisal. Data were collected through the crowd-sourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTURK). Three hundred seventy-seven individuals completed questionnaires related to distress (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales [DASS]), emotion regulation (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [ERQ]) and Alexithymia (Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire [BVAQ]). Three mediation models were constructed for depression, anxiety and stress, with BVAQ subscales (verbalizing, identifying, emotionalizing, fantasizing, and analyzing) as predictors and ERQ subscales (suppression and reappraisal) as mediators. Results indicated 37.3 % variance in depression, 25.2 % variance in anxiety, and 35.3 % variance in stress was explained by each model. Direct associations revealed emotionalizing and fantasizing were negatively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress, while verbalizing was additionally associated with depression, identifying was additionally associated with anxiety, and all four BVAQ subscales were associated with stress. BVAQ subscales demonstrated negative associations with reappraisal and positive associations with suppression that mediated anxiety and depression. However, suppression did not mediate relationships between BVAQ subscales with stress. Findings support the importance of examining multiple factors of alexithymia and associations with emotion regulation strategies and distress.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors report no conflict of interest with respect to the content of this manuscript.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Participant enrollment outlining reasons for exclusion.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Path model testing direct and indirect effects from alexithymia to mental health symptoms through emotion regulation strategies DASS = Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale. Note: The correlations between the five subscales representing alexithymia are not presented here but were included in the models. There were three models tested with separate DASS outcomes as indicators: depression, anxiety, and stress.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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