Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, New York NY, United States.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, New York NY, United States; Brigham and Women's Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, Boston MA, United States.
Psychiatry Res. 2019 Mar;273:218-226. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2019.01.033. Epub 2019 Jan 11.
Alexithymia, or the inability to identify and describe one's emotions, is significantly higher in bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ), compared to healthy controls (HC). Alexithymia has also been observed to predict psychosocial functioning in SZ. We investigated whether alexithymia predicted social and everyday functioning in BD, as well as transdiagnostically in HC, BD, and SZ patients. 56 BD, 45 SZ, and 50 HC were administered and compared on tests measuring neurocognition, social cognition, functioning and alexithymia. We conducted linear regressions assessing whether alexithymia predicted functional outcomes in BD. Next, we conducted hierarchical stepwise linear regressions investigating the predictive ability of neurocognition, social cognition and alexithymia on everyday and social functioning in our overall sample. BD and SZ patients were comparable on most demographics and demonstrated higher alexithymia compared to HCs. In BD, alexithymia predicted social functioning only. In the overall sample, difficulty identifying and describing feelings predicted everyday functioning; difficulty describing feelings predicted social functioning. Results suggest that aspects of alexithymia significantly predict functioning among these psychiatric groups, above and beyond the contributions of previously identified factors such as neurocognition and social cognition. Results may aid in developing proper interventions aimed at improving patients' ability to articulate their feelings.
述情障碍，即无法识别和描述自己情绪的能力，在双相情感障碍（BD）和精神分裂症（SZ）中明显高于健康对照组（HC）。述情障碍也被观察到可以预测 SZ 的社会心理功能。我们调查了述情障碍是否可以预测 BD 的社会和日常功能，以及在 HC、BD 和 SZ 患者中跨诊断预测。对 56 名 BD、45 名 SZ 和 50 名 HC 进行了神经认知、社会认知、功能和述情障碍测试，并进行了比较。我们进行了线性回归分析，评估述情障碍是否可以预测 BD 的功能结果。接下来，我们进行了分层逐步线性回归，调查神经认知、社会认知和述情障碍对我们总体样本中日常和社会功能的预测能力。BD 和 SZ 患者在大多数人口统计学特征上相似，并且与 HCs 相比，表现出更高的述情障碍。在 BD 中，述情障碍仅预测社会功能。在总体样本中，难以识别和描述感受预测日常功能；难以描述感受预测社会功能。结果表明，述情障碍的各个方面在这些精神疾病群体中显著预测功能，超出了先前确定的因素（如神经认知和社会认知）的贡献。结果可能有助于开发适当的干预措施，旨在提高患者表达感受的能力。
