ReviewFrontiers in psychology2017
Alexithymia as a Transdiagnostic Precursor to Empathy Abnormalities: The Functional Role of the Insula.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Scientometric Review of Alexithymia: Mapping Thematic and Disciplinary Shifts in Half a Century of Research.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Effects of mindfulness-based interventions on alexithymia: a systematic review.Evidence-based mental health · 2019Pooled it
- Beyond contextual stressors: uncertain reflective functioning, loneliness and emotional exhaustion as psychological correlates of perceived stress in prison officers.International journal of prison health · 2026Article
- Empathy and Autism: Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autistic Individuals Using the Perth Empathy Scale.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Alexithymia and Empathy in Parent-Youth Dyads: An Actor-Partner Interdependence Model Analysis.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Social Anxiety Symptoms Predict Poorer Facial Emotion Recognition in Autistic Male Adolescents and Young Adults Without Intellectual Disability.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Article
- Understanding empathy deficits and emotion dysregulation in psychopathy: The mediating role of alexithymia.PloS one · 2024Article
- The interconnection between social media addiction, alexithymia and empathy in medical students.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Childhood maltreatment and aggressive behavior among college students: a serial mediation model of authenticity and alexithymia.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Article
- The Role of Alexithymia and Impulsivity in Male Victims and Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- A cost-benefit framework for prosocial motivation-Advantages and challenges.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Dissociating cognitive and affective empathy across psychopathy dimensions: The role of interoception and alexithymia.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- How does it feel? An exploration of neurobiological and clinical correlates of alexithymia in trauma-exposed police-officers with and without PTSD.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Article
- Prosocial behavior is associated with transdiagnostic markers of affective sensitivity in multiple domains.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Article
- Understanding Oneself to Understand Others: The Role of Alexithymia and Anxiety in the Relationships Between Autistic Trait Dimensions and Empathy.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2022Article
- Disentangling interoceptive abilities in alexithymia.Psychological research · 2022Article
- The Development of a Multi-Modality Emotion Recognition Test Presented via a Mobile Application.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Hormonal abnormalities in alexithymia.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Insula reactivity mediates subjective isolation stress in alexithymia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Distorted empathic processing has been observed across multiple psychiatric disorders. Simulation theory provides a theoretical framework that proposes a mechanism through which empathy difficulties may arise. Specifically, introspection-centric simulation theory (IST) predicts that an inability to accurately interpret and describe internal affective states may lead to empathy difficulties. The purpose of this review is to synthesize and summarize an empirical literature suggesting that simulation theory provides insights into a cognitive and neurobiological mechanism (i.e., alexithymia and insula pathology) that negatively impacts empathic processing, in addition to how disruptions in these processes manifest across psychiatric disorders. Specifically, we review an emerging non-clinical literature suggesting that consistent with IST, alexithymia and associated insula pathology leads to empathy deficits. Subsequently, we highlight clinical research suggesting that a large number of disorders characterized by empathy pathology also feature alexithymia. Collectively, these findings motivate the importance for future work to establish the role of alexithymia in contributing to empathy deficits across clinical symptoms and disorders. The current review suggests that simulation theory provides a tractable conceptual platform for identifying a potential common cognitive and neural marker that is associated with empathy deficits across a wide array of diagnostic classes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.