Alexithymia and psychiatric symptoms in a population of nursery workers

Alexithymia was investigated in a sample of professional nursery workers in Huddinge community, Sweden. Also investigated were feelings of well-being, symptoms of somatic and psychic anxiety, depressive symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms, and level of social dysfunction. The prevalence of alexithymia was 7.9%. Half of the items assessing somatic anxiety and 28.5% of those assessing depressive symptoms were related to high TAS-20 scores. The feeling factors of TAS-20, difficulty in identifying and expressing feelings, accounted in this study for the majority of relationships to the other variables. Externally-oriented thinking remained independent and mainly nonrelated to the other measured variables. It was hypothesized that a deficit in the cognitive processing and modulation of emotions may leave alexithymic individuals prone to states of heightened sympathetic arousal. Confirmation of these theories was found in this study where participants expressing high levels of vegetative and visceral symptoms of anxiety also gained high scores for alexithymia and depressive symptoms.