The relationship between two types of impaired emotion processing: repressive coping and alexithymia

The constructs of repressive coping and alexithymia are both related to impaired emotion processing, yet individuals with a repressive coping style (repressors) score lower than controls on standard self-report measures of alexithymia. A large body of evidence indicates that repressors avoid negative affect. Therefore, the current study examined the relationship between repressive coping and alexithymia by using independently-rated interviews with the aim of bypassing repressors’ tendency of avoiding negative affect. Results showed that repressors scored high on alexithymia, similar to anxious individuals on the independently-rated interview, but scored low on alexithymia on a questionnaire measure. Our findings confirm a link between alexithymia and repressive coping and stress the need for non-standard measures in exploring the nature of the relationship between repressive coping and alexithymia.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Frontiers in Psychology

• Publication date

  2015-06-16

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00809PMID 26136706PMCID 4468358
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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