Browsing by Author "Mäki-Filppula, Fanni"

Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate whether alexithymia and its subscales (difficulty in identifying and describing emotions and externalizing thinking) are related to exhaustion symptoms. Alexithymia reflects difficulty in identifying and describing emotions and has been found to be associated with a number of health and mental health problems. In turn, exhaustion is a problem that causes significant harm to individuals and society. This paper is the first to examine the association of alexithymia subscales with exhaustion symptoms. Methods: the study used the Young Finns Study follow-up data, from which data on alexithymia was examined in 1980 and exhaustion symptoms in the follow-up survey in 2012. The size of the sample was 1230. The research questions were explored using generalized linear gamma regression models controlling for different background variables (socioeconomic factors of adulthood and childhood family environment factors and depressive symptoms). Results: Higher alexithymia scores were found to be associated with more severe exhaustion symptoms. In addition, higher difficulties in identifying and describing emotions were associated with more intense exhaustion symptoms and higher levels of externalizing thinking were associated with lower intense exhaustion symptoms. Conclusion: Overall, alexithymic traits contribute to the intensity of exhaustion symptoms. However, controlling for depressive symptomatology weakened the association of the total alexithymia score with exhaustion symptomatology. This study raised the need to further investigate the significance of the alexithymia subscales in the future.