Brewer Rebecca, Cook Richard, Bird Geoffrey
MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London SE5 8AF, UK; School of Psychology, University of East London, University Way, London E16 2RD.
Department of Psychology , City University London , London EC1V OHB , UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Oct 12;3(10):150664. doi: 10.1098/rsos.150664. eCollection 2016 Oct.
Alexithymia is a sub-clinical construct, traditionally characterized by difficulties identifying and describing one's own emotions. Despite the clear need for interoception (interpreting physical signals from the body) when identifying one's own emotions, little research has focused on the selectivity of this impairment. While it was originally assumed that the interoceptive deficit in alexithymia is specific to emotion, recent evidence suggests that alexithymia may also be associated with difficulties perceiving some non-affective interoceptive signals, such as one's heart rate. It is therefore possible that the impairment experienced by those with alexithymia is common to all aspects of interoception, such as interpreting signals of hunger, arousal, proprioception, tiredness and temperature. In order to determine whether alexithymia is associated with selectively impaired affective interoception, or general interoceptive impairment, we investigated the association between alexithymia and self-reported non-affective interoceptive ability, and the extent to which individuals perceive similarity between affective and non-affective states (both measured using questionnaires developed for the purpose of the current study), in both typical individuals ( = 105 (89 female), mean age = 27.5 years) and individuals reporting a diagnosis of a psychiatric condition ( = 103 (83 female), mean age = 31.3 years). Findings indicated that alexithymia was associated with poor non-affective interoception and increased perceived similarity between affective and non-affective states, in both the typical and clinical populations. We therefore suggest that rather than being specifically associated with affective impairment, alexithymia is better characterized by a general failure of interoception.
述情障碍是一种亚临床概念，传统上其特征是在识别和描述自身情绪方面存在困难。尽管在识别自身情绪时明显需要内感受（解读来自身体的生理信号），但很少有研究关注这种损伤的选择性。虽然最初认为述情障碍中的内感受缺陷是情绪特有的，但最近的证据表明，述情障碍也可能与感知一些非情感性内感受信号（如心率）的困难有关。因此，述情障碍患者所经历的损伤可能在内感受的所有方面都存在，比如解读饥饿、唤醒、本体感觉、疲劳和温度的信号。为了确定述情障碍是与情感性内感受选择性受损有关，还是与一般性内感受损伤有关，我们调查了述情障碍与自我报告的非情感性内感受能力之间的关联，以及个体在多大程度上感知情感和非情感状态之间的相似性（两者均使用为本研究目的开发的问卷进行测量），研究对象包括典型个体（n = 105（89名女性），平均年龄 = 27.5岁）和报告患有精神疾病诊断的个体（n = 103（83名女性），平均年龄 = 31.3岁）。研究结果表明，在典型人群和临床人群中，述情障碍都与非情感性内感受能力差以及情感和非情感状态之间感知到的相似性增加有关。因此，我们认为述情障碍并非特别与情感损伤相关，而是以内感受的普遍失败为更好的特征。
