Assessing Alexithymia for Positive and Negative Emotions: the Role of Granularity and Dialecticism

Alexithymia is a transdiagnostic risk factor for the development and maintenance of psychological symptomatology. Tied to particularities in emotion regulation, recent theorizations consider difficulties describing and identifying feelings dimensions of alexithymia to influence the appraisal stage of emotional processing. Emotional appraisal is related to emotional complexity, which can be operationalized by emotional granularity (i.e. emotion differentiation) and dialecticism (i.e. reporting feeling positive and negative emotions at the same time). This study aimed at replicating and extending previous findings by focusing on differentiating alexithymia for positive and negative emotions. Participants (n = 115, mean age 45 y.o; 75% women) evaluated their emotional experience after watching videos inducing anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness. Alexithymia was measured by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ). No association between alexithymia and positive emotional complexity was observed despite the use of the PAQ assessing alexithymia for positive emotions. Difficulties describing and identifying negative feelings from PAQ were predicted by higher negative dialecticism. Difficulties describing feelings from both scales was predicted by higher negative dialecticism. These results confirm the association between alexithymia facets and emotional complexity regarding negative emotions only, and emphasize the importance of controlling for negative affect in alexithymia studies.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-025-00344-7.