ArticleAffective science2025
How Alexithymia Increases Mental Health Symptoms in Adolescence: Longitudinal Evidence for the Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation.
Article in Affective science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The role of alexithymia in the association between childhood maltreatment and depressive symptoms in Chinese men with methamphetamine use disorder.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Article
- Emotion regulation skills training for adolescents and parents in a clinical setting: a randomised controlled trial.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2026Article
- Emotion Regulation Difficulties as a Statistical Mediator of the Association Between Alexithymia and Coping Strategies in Adolescents.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Network analysis of empathy, anxiety and depression symptoms, relationship satisfaction, sensory processing sensitivity, and alexithymia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Examining the Influence of Alexithymia, Gender, and Age on Drug Use among Iranian Students: the Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation Difficulties.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing feelings, as well as a lack of focus on feelings. Alexithymia is a transdiagnostic risk factor for developing a wide array of psychopathologies, such as anxiety and depression, with a key hypothesised mechanism being the impairing impact of alexithymia on emotion regulation competency. However, no study has tested whether difficulties with emotion regulation mediate the link between alexithymia and psychopathological symptoms using longitudinal designs. The present study aimed to address this limitation by collecting data from 164 Iranian high school students (73% male; aged 13-18 years old) at two time points, 7 months apart. The results revealed that baseline alexithymia levels not only related to future emotion regulation difficulties but predicted increased emotion regulation difficulties in the future. Furthermore, these increased difficulties in emotion regulation mediated the relationship between baseline alexithymia and worsening of psychological distress (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms) over time. This study helps link alexithymia and emotion regulation difficulties and highlights the critical role that alexithymia plays in emotional health and illness during adolescence. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-025-00318-9.
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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.