Am J Psychiatry 1986; 143:312-316
Copyright © 1986 by American Psychiatric Association
Alexithymia: an experimental study of cerebral commissurotomy patients and normal control subjects
WD TenHouten, KD Hoppe, JE Bogen and DO Walter
This study assessed alexithymia in six patients with complete cerebral
commissurotomy, two patients with partial commissurotomy, and eight matched
control subjects. Comparisons were based on content-analytic measures of
the subjects' spoken and written responses to a film that symbolically
represented death and loss. The commissurotomized patients were more
alexithymic on all four lexical-level variables, all six sentential-level
variables, and all six global-level variables. Discriminant function
analysis found a linear combination of four variables that effectively
discriminated groups of fully commissurotomized, partially
commissurotomized, and normal control subjects and correctly classified 15
of the 16 subjects.
