Alexithymia affects understanding of emotional expressions.

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Hi. I believe that autism and alexithymia can be identified within the same individual and also in isolation. In the case that someone with ASD is also highly alexithymic, it is sometimes possible to unpick the contribution each condition/trait makes to behaviours or attitudes.

This paper from 2010 is a very good example of how this cane be done:

"Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism" - I can't post a direct link because I'm too new, or something. But you can google it. It might be paywalled, I don't know. The gist is that empathetic responding in ASD is mediated by level of alexithymia, and not by severity of ASD symptoms.

I scored only 8 on the EQ which means I am very unempathic but I scored 64 on the Toronto alexithymia scale which isn't high considering equal to or greater than 61 is alexithymic. So I am puzzled as to how they correlate.

The total score on the TAS-20 is made up of three subscale scores. Each subscale has a different number of items. The scale with the largest number of items, and so the largest impact on your overall score is the "externally orientated thinking" subscale, which doesn't have much to do with identifying and describing emotions, which is the aspect of alexithymia which I imagine correlates most with empathy deficit.

For some reason, the second quiz wouldn't automatically tally my results, so I did them myself.

I got a 140.

Hi all,

I am one of the authors on the paper which kicked off this discussion. It is always great to hear about what people think of the research. It was really interesting reading your ideas, and in particular, thanks Anomiel for summarising the findings (probably far better than I could have).

In case anyone is having issues accessing the articles discussed, please Google "Geoff Bird Lab papers" (I cannot post links as I am new to the forum- sorry). You should be able to find them all there. In particular, have a look at this paper my supervisors have just written:

Bird, G., & Cook, R. (in press). Mixed emotions: The contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism.

I would be interested to hear more about what everyone thinks about the link between autism and alexithymia.

Punit

I don't know if it was alexithymia, but I could tell my oldest brothers wife was upset the other night by the sound of her voice, but couldn't tell anything was upsetting her by looking at her.