Alexithymia as a potential source of symptom over-reporting

DOI

The traditional interpretation of symptom over-reporting is that it indicates malingering. We explored a different perspective, namely that over-reporting of eccentric symptoms is related to deficits in articulating internal experiences (i.e., alexithymia). Given that alexithymia has been linked to sleep problems and that fatigue may fuel inattentive responding to symptom lists, we administered measures of alexithymia (TAS-20) and symptom over-reporting (SIMS), but also sleep quality (SLEEP-50) to forensic psychiatric outpatients (n = 40) and non-forensic participants (n = 40). Forensic patients scored significantly higher on all three indices than non-forensic participants. In the total sample as well as in subsamples, over-reporting correlated positively and significantly with alexithymia, with r’s being in the .50-.65 range. Sleep problems were also related to over-reporting, but in the full sample and in the forensic subsample, alexithymia predicted variance in over-reporting over and above sleep problems. Although our study is cross-sectional in nature, its results indicate that alexithymia as a potential source of over-reporting merits systematic research.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/EW9JXQ
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/EW9JXQ
Provenance
Creator Merckelbach, Harald ORCID logo; Prins, Chinouk ORCID logo; Boskovic, Irena ORCID logo; Niesten, Isabella ORCID logo; Campo, Joost à
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Merckelbach, Harald; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2017
Rights CC0 Waiver; info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
OpenAccess false
Contact Merckelbach, Harald (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type survey data; Dataset
Format application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; application/x-spss-sav
Size 60538; 108496
Version 1.1
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences