Alessitimia e psicopatologia in adolescenza: studio caso-controllo. ALEXITHIMYA AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN ADOLESCENCE: A CASE – CONTROL STUDY

This paper aims to study the relationship between alexithymia and psycho-behavioural disorders. It compares a group of psychiatric teenagers (experimental group) with a group of "healthy" teenagers (control group), considering the gender and age variables. This paper also considers the relationship between alexithymic characteristics in adolescents and parents. To test alexithymia we used Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), to test emotional-behavioural disorders and psychiatric symptoms we used respectively the Youth Self Report questionnaire (YSR 11-18) and the Symptom Checklist-scale -90-Revised (SCL-90-R). The results show that alexithymia is prevalent among psychiatric adolescents if compared with "healthy" subjects. In the control group no differences were found between males and females, instead in the experimental group girls are more alexithymic than boys. According to age, in the control group alexithymic characteristics tend to decrease with age increasing (and with cognitive abilities’ improvement). Instead, in the experimental group there is no difference and it suggests that the presence of psychopathology might influences the evolutionary movement in emotional processing skill with age. Studying the relationship between alexithymia and emotional and behavioral disorders in the experimental group, in contrast to the control group, an association between alexithymia and externalizing problems come out. Finally, according to some other literature studies, we found that there was a significant association between adolescents’ and mothers’ alexithymia scores rather than fathers’ ones.