THE ROLE OF ALEXITHYMIA AND EMOTION REGULATION DIFFICULTIES IN PREDICTING PSYCHOSOMATIC SYMPTOMS AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Psychosomatic symptoms – Physical illnesses such as headaches, stomach and fatigue are common in the university students, associated with scientific impairments, and impaired quality of life, which are not fully explained by medical pathology. This document develops and tests a mediation model in which Alexithymia, a characteristic that is characterized by difficult identification and description of your own emotions, indirectly predicts psychosomatic symptoms through emotion regulation issues. Starting from the Process Model of Emotion Regulation (Gross, 1998), the deficit-in-emotional processing account from alexithymia (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997) and somatosensory amplification theory, this paper suspects that alexithymia impairs students’ capacity to regulate emotional experience and that this regulatory impairment is manifesting itself again as physical symptomatology. Based on the sample size of 250 university students and validated self-reporting measures (the Toronto Alexithymia Scale Sema20, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and the Patient Health Questionnaire Sema15), a mediation analysis (Hayes' PROCESS Model 4, 5,000 bootstrap resamples) indicated that alexithymia positively associated was emotion regulation difficulties (β = .77, p < .001) and that it is positively associated with psychosomatic symptoms (β = .46, p < .001). The indirect effect of alexithymia on psychosomatic symptoms through emotion regulation problems was significant (β = .36, 95% CI [26, .46]) and continued to have a significant direct effect (β = .33, p < .001) indicative of partial mediation. The complete model represented 55.4% of the psychosomatic symptoms variance. These findings underpin emotional regulation difficulties as an important mechanism link alexithymia of physical symptoms in university students and suggest that emotional regulation focused interventions could reduce psychosomatic complaints even among students who remain relatively alexithymic.