Glossary // Glossary term Clinical
Alexithymia
A personality trait characterised by difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings to others, and an externally oriented thinking style. It is not a diagnosis and is distributed continuously in the population; it is most often measured with the self-report Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Because the scale asks people to judge their own awareness of emotion, scores may be limited by the very difficulty they are meant to capture, which is one reason researchers also use interview and performance measures. Affective computing promises to infer emotion as if it were a system metric. The evidence on facial movements and autonomic signals, together with questions of consent, explains why every metric in this artifact is an artistic value. Labelling an emotion engages prefrontal regulation and reduces amygdala responses in the laboratory. Precise naming is a low-cost first step that changes the course of an emotion without discharge. The works the definition rests on, with the level of evidence each was appraised at. (1994). The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale—I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure. doi:10.1016/0022-3999(94)90005-1 Cited for the existence and three-factor structure of the TAS-20 as a self-report measure of alexithymia. Sample details were not re-verified from an abstract and are not stated on the site.Where the site uses it
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