Alexithymia in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

Alexithymia refers to pronounced difficulty in identifying and describing one's own emotions and is associated with an externally oriented focus of thinking. Alexithymia is known to be much more common in adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared with the typically developing (TD) adult population. However, we know very little about alexithymia in young children with ASD and advancing our understanding of this topic may be of critical clinical and translational importance. Here, we present the first study to examine alexithymia in children with ASD. We find that alexithymia is substantially elevated in ASD on both self- and parent-report measures. Despite both measures being sensitive to on-average group differentiation, we find no evidence of correlation between such measures, indicating that children and their parents may be using different sources of information. Parent-rated alexithymia is also associated with increasing levels of autistic traits. Discrepancy between self and other alexithymia ratings are also associated with autistic traits, but only in ASD. These results underscore the idea that assessing alexithymia in ASD at younger ages may help identify important subgroups that have particular difficulties in the domain of emotion processing. Autism Res 2016, 9: 773-780. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Alexithymia, but not autism spectrum disorder, may be related to the production of emotional facial expressions

“…Importantly, the two groups were matched on measures of verbal (and nonverbal) IQ, and verbal IQ was not significantly associated with alexithymia, indicating the higher CAM scores in the ASD group were not explained by lower verbal ability. This finding replicates the large group differences in CAM scores between children with and without ASD reported by Griffin et al [47] and complements studies showing higher rates of alexithymia in adults with ASD [8, 67]. …”

“…In addition to using the CAM, Griffin et al [47] assessed alexithymia using the Children’s Alexithymia Questionnaire-Self Report (CAQ-SR; [68]). While both measures were sensitive enough to demonstrate higher levels of alexithymia in the ASD participants, correlational analyses revealed no relationship between the two measures indicating that children and their parents may be using different sources of information or that the content of the respective measures is highly dissimilar.…”

“…A total of 224 parents of children who had experienced emotional trauma participated in that study [46]. To date, only one previous study [47] has used the CAM for research within the ASD population.…”

Expressive Incoherence and Alexithymia in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…It has an impact at both intrapersonal and interpersonal levels and has been linked to socio-affective deficits such as a lack of empathy (Guttman and Laporte 2002). The few studies that have examined alexithymia in children with ASD have found that, similarly to adults (Berthoz and Hill 2005), alexithymia is more prevalent among children with ASD than among TD children (Griffin et al 2015;Rieffe et al 2007). In one study it was found that the facial expressions of individuals with higher levels of alexithymia appeared to be odder than of those with lower levels (Brewer et al 2016).…”

Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

“…But this simplistic picture is further complicated in light of the new insights provided by the alexithymia hypothesis 3 which postulates that only the deficits observed in the sociocognitive domain are unique to the autism phenotype, while the deficits associated with socioaffective domain are due to the co-occurring alexithymic phenotype and is not a feature of autism per se 27 . Although the preponderance rate of clinical levels of alexithymia in healthy population is at 10%, it is unusually prevalent (40-65%) in adults and children with ASD [28][29][30][31][32] . Therefore, it is important to account for its effects in emotional processing deficits observed in ASD, especially because trait alexithymia itself has been associated with impaired emotional processing (e.g., empathy [33][34][35] , emotion regulation 36 , emotional interoception 37 , etc.).…”