Browsing by Subject "TAS-20"

Alexithymia is a multidimensional personality trait, which includes difficulty recognizing and describing one’s emotions, a restricted imagination and an externally oriented, concrete style of thinking. The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) is overwhelmingly the most common questionnaire used to measure alexithymia. The TAS-20 has been used to study how alexithymia is related to a broad range of psychological and physiological variables, and TAS-20 scores have been consistently associated with psychopathology. The aim of this review is to investigate the validity of the TAS-20. The review focuses on the construct and criterion validity of the TAS-20. The questionnaire’s criterion validity is assessed by examining how the questionnaire is related to other measures of alexithymia as well as to alexithymic behaviour. Areas of behaviour assessed are the limited verbal expression of feelings, a concrete style of thinking and lack of imagination, physical health and symptom reporting, and body awareness. Current studies do not give enough support for the overall validity of the TAS-20. Factor analytic studies support a three-factor structure in both clinical and nonclinical populations. However, the subscales of the questionnaire don’t seem to be interrelated as strongly as would be theoretically expected. An alexithymic person should score high on all subscales, but it is uncertain whether this kind of response pattern is likely. Future studies should investigate how strongly variables such as negative affectivity, depressiveness and a tendency to report symptoms affect TAS-20 scores, as they seem to be confounders. Studies related to the criterion validity of the TAS-20 are variable in their results and don’t encourage confidence in concluding that the questionnaire measures alexithymic behaviour. The strongest evidence given by studies is for the expected association between TAS-20 scores and somatization.