Description
Taylor et al. (1985) published the 26-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (here called TAS-26). The authors initially
described alexithymia more or less according to the description of Nemiah and Sifneos (1970a) :
‘Alexithymic patients have difficulty identifying and describing their feelings; their cognitive style is concrete and reality-based ( la
pense ´e ope´ratoire ) and they have impoverished inner emotional and fantasy lives.’ Nemiah and Sifneos (1970a)
Yet, instead of constructing subscales for these five traits, they redefined the alexithymia construct:
‘Recognizing that the development of any self-report scale must begin with a definition of the construct being measured. We first
reviewed the literature on alexithymia and then selected five content areas thought to reflect the substantive domain of the construct.
These were: (1) difficulty in describing feelings; (2) difficulty in distinguishing between feelings and bodily sensations; (3) lack of intro-
spection; (4) Social conformity; and (5) impoverished fantasy life and poor dream recall.’ Taylor et al. (1985)
As stated by the authors themselves, they thus introduced elements into their alexithymia construct that were
not part of the original construct ( Taylor et al., 1997 , p.58). Furthermore, of their item pool of 41 items, 16 were
taken from either the SSPS, the Interoceptive Awareness Subscale of the Eating Disorder Inventory or the Need
for Cognition Scale. This had consequences for their final scale. Factor analysis, item-total correlations, and esti-
mates of internal consistency of the 41-item scale were conducted to determine the selection of items to be
included in the final version. Twenty-six items were selected loading on four factors that were described as: F1
‘Ability to identify and describe feelings, and distinguish between feelings and bodily sensations’; F2 ‘Ability to
communicate feelings to other people’; F3 ‘Daydream factor’; and F4 ‘Focusing on external events rather than
inner experiences’ (externally oriented thinking). Item-factor loading varied between .31 and .69. Together the
four factors explained 25.7% of the variance.
Taylor et al. (1992) published a revised version (TAS-R). The authors added 17 new items to the existing 26
items. The combined pool of 43 items was administered to a sample of 965 undergraduates, and on the basis of
item-factor loadings ( $.30), sufficient internal reliabilities, and low correlations ( ,.20) with measures of social
desirability, 23 items were selected for the TAS-R. Factor analysis yielded two factors: Factor 1 comprised 14
items assessing both the ability to distinguish between feelings and bodily sensations associated with emotional
arousal and the ability to describe feelings to others (18.5% variance), whereas Factor 2 comprised nine items
assessing externally oriented thinking (6.6% variance).
Two years later, improvement of the TAS-R was considered necessary, because confirmative factor analysis
indicated that a three-factor had better fit, and further since the TAS-R lacked a subscale assessing imaginal activ-
ity. Hence, Bagby et al. (1994a) developed the TAS-202. Seventeen items were added to the 26 of the original
TAS-26. For the 43-item version, correlations with the Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Inventory (SDI),
item-facet correlations, and item-total correlations with the remaining items on the other content domains were
examined. Items correlating $.20 with the SDI, correlating #.20 with their facet or #.20 with the remaining
items on other content domains were dismissed. The remaining items were subjected to principal factoring, with
varimax rotation. Items with loadings of $.35 on one and only one factor were retained. The overall alpha of the
imaginal processing scale turned out to be .69, while further these items dropped the corrected mean item-total
correlation below .20. In fact, only three of the 12 imaginal processing items met the pre-established statistical
requirement. Instead of creating new items the authors decided, against their initial aim, to take all items refer-
ring to imaginal processing out of the scale ( Bagby et al., 1994a ). The final scale comprises 20 items and three sub-
scales, named: ‘Difficulty in identifying feelings’ (DIF, 7 items), ‘Difficulty describing feelings’ (DDF, 5 items),
and ‘Externally-oriented thinking’ (EOT, 8 items). Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert-type response scale .
Most items have face validity for their facets, but there are exceptions, three items referring to ill-understood
bodily experiences, and one item referring to the cause of anger, and not to an inability to identify emotions,
furthermore, the items of EOT seem fall in two groups (see Results and Comments).
Sample
The samples in the Bagby et al. (1994a) study consisted of 965 undergraduates (159 male; 242 females;
M521.1 years, SD54.5.), and 218 (94 males; 124 females; M535.2 years, SD 511.5) diagnostically heteroge-
neous psychiatric outpatients. The two samples in the Bagby et al. (1994b) study comprised (1) 85 undergraduates
2Since the TAS-20 literature is extensive, we have searched on ‘most important’ and ‘last 5 years’.240 9. MEASURES OF ALEXITHYMIA
III. EMOTION REGULATION