Introduction. Alexithymia is related to poor emotion regulation strategies as well as higher rates of somatic disorders. The aim of the present study was to assess the relationship between alexithymia and the general symptoms experienced by the pregnant women.Material and Methods. In a cross-sectional study, a total number of 350 pregnant women, attending the antenatal clinics, were randomly selected. A standardized Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) was used to elicit responses from participants with alexithymia. The general symptoms scores were measured using the Iranian version of the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised, 90 items. The statistical associations between alexithymia and the general symptoms were then investigated through liner regression.Results. A total number of 186 of pregnant women with alexithymia were compared with the 164 cases without alexithymia. The high scores on Total Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 and the difficulties to identify feelings emerged as major predictors for the current psychopathology on all SCL-90-R subscales. The difficulty in describing feelings features of alexithymia is positively associated with interpersonal sensitivity and paranoid ideation, but it is inversely associated with the phobic anxiety dimension.Conclusion. This study showed that the pregnant women with difficulty in describing feelings features of alexithymia are likely to show a broad range of psychopathology. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize the benefits of specific psychotherapeutic techniques to improve self-differentiation so that we can reduce the likelihood of mental illnesses in pregnant women.

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Introduction: Previous studies suggest that the severity of alterations in cognitive functions in people with a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder are directly related to the deterioration in overall functioning and life quality. Aim: The present study aimed to test the cognitive functional model of patients with bipolar disorder regarding childhood traumatic experiences based on the mediating role of emotional instability and expressed emotion. Method: The research method is descriptive-correlational modeling of structural equations. The sample population included all patients with bipolar disorder who were admitted to Yahyanejad hospital in Babol, Iran during 17 months (from March/April 2010 until mid-September 2020). In total, 379 subjects were selected by convenience sampling. Data collection tools were The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) by Bernstein and Fink (1998), the Emotional Instability Scale by Oliver and Simpson (2004), the Expressed Emotion Level by Hall & et al. (2007), and the Cognitive Abilities Questionnaire by Nejati (2013). Data analysis was performed by structural equation modeling (SEM) in SPSS version 24 and Lisrel version 8.8. Results: The findings showed that childhood traumatic experiences directly affect emotional instability, expressed emotion, and cognitive function in patients with bipolar disorder (P<0.5). Further, emotional instability and expressed emotion play a mediating role in the correlation between childhood traumatic experiences and cognitive function in patients with bipolar disorder (P<0.5). Conclusion: According to the results, emotional instability and expressed emotion have a mediating role in the correlation between childhood traumatic experiences and cognitive function in patients with bipolar disorder. Therefore, in order to improve the cognitive function of people with bipolar disorder, instrumented variables of stability and emotion should be taken into consideration.