Self-Awareness in alexithymia and associations with social anxiety
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Self-Awareness in alexithymia and associations with social anxiety Georgia Panayiotou 1,2 & Chrysanthi Leonidou 1 & Elena Constantinou 1,3 & Michalis P. Michaelides 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Alexithymia’s relation to low awareness of emotion is well-documented: Low self-awareness and the externally oriented thinking style of alexithymia may reflect avoidance of unwanted experiences, a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. The role that this plays in the association between alexithymia and emotional disorders, including social anxiety, needs to be further explicated. This investigation, examined a) the association between alexithymia and two indices of low awareness of internal experiences, namely low private self-consciousness and experiential avoidance, and between alexithymia and avoidant emotion regulation, specifically suppression b) the hypothesis that low self-awareness (experiential avoidance, low private self-consciousness and suppression) mediates the association between alexithymia and social anxiety, in two student samples. Results indicated, as predicted, that alexithymia is associated with low private self-consciousness, high experiential avoidance and greater use of suppression. The association between alexithymia and social anxiety was mediated through experiential avoidance and partially through low private self-consciousness and suppression. Results suggest that low self-awareness in alexithymia may be related to increased avoidance of internal experiences, which may play a protective role in the short term, but in the long run may contribute to the link between alexithymia and mental health problems. Keywords Alexithymia . Experiential avoidance . Emotion regulation . Awareness . Social anxiety
Alexithymia is believed to encompass difficulties in identifying and verbally expressing emotions (Lane et al. 1996; Sifneos 1972; Wagner and Lee 2008) and has been linked to psychological symptoms, like depression (Foran and O’Leary 2012; Parker et al. 1991; Picardi et al. 2011; Taylor and Bagby 2004) and anxiety (Marchesi et al. 2005; Marchesi et al. 2008), including social anxiety (Turk et al. 2005; Mennin et al. 2009; Kashdan and Farmer 2014). Its association with emotional disorders seems to pertain to the difficulties in processing, expressing and regulating emotion that are core aspects of the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9855-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Georgia Panayiotou [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus
2
Center for Applied Neuroscience, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
3
Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King_s College London, London, UK
alexithymia construct, but the specific pathway remains under investigation (Lumley et al. 1996b; Lumley 2000). At the same t
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