Chapter 4
Applications of Emotional Intelligence Research to Everyday Life:
Low Emotional Intelligence and Mental Illness
By Graeme J. Taylor
Introduction
1. Mental illnesses and how it affects E.I.[1]
2. This chapter will cover
a. Alexitheymia
-What is Alexithymia?
-as Low E.I.
b. Maladaptive Coping
c. Psychiatric Disorders
-Substance Use Disorders
-Eating Disorders
-Somatoform Disorders
-Anxiety and Depressive
Disorders
-Borderline Personality
Disorders
d. Implications for Treatment and
Prevention
Alexitheymia
1. What is Alexitheymia?
a. Definition consists of four important features
1. difficulty in identifying
feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
2. difficulty describing feelings to
others
3. a poor fantasy life
4. cognitive style that is literal
and focuses on the minute details of external events
b. Term was created in the 1970s by Peter Sifneos a
psychoanalyst and colleague John Nemiah
1. The characteristics above were
noticed by Sifneos and Nemiah
2. other investigators reported
seeing the similar characteristics with drug addicts and patients with post
traumatic states and eating disorders.
2. Additional Characteristics
a. Difficulties in emotional processing
b. Unable to separate emotional feelings from physical states
1. Spontaneously use words like sad,
nervous, or frightened, but are unable to feel or describe what these emotions
are like
2. often are impulsive
3. does not understand their own
feelings
4. unable to read others’ emotions
-are unempathic
and unable to deal with others in distress
c. People are not either alexithymic or nonalexithymic
1. It only means the lack of feeling
3. Test Reliability
a. Validity
1. 1980s found that Alexithymia was
not very valid
2. There was very little scientific
support
3. Studies examined the association
between Alexithymia and medical and psychiatric disorders were measured by
instruments that were unreliable
b. Developing a reliable and valid instrument
1. method was constructed by
validation used in a personality research
2. 26 item self report Toronto
Alexithymia Scale (TAS)
3. Was revised to a 20 item version
TAS-20
4. TAS and TAS-20 correlate with
each other and both versions are reliable and valid
c. TAS-20
1. Assesses three of the four
features
-feeling identification
-describing feelings
-external oriented
thinking (this part also tests low imagination)
2. The three factor scale converge
and diverge in theoretically meaningful ways with measures of related and
unrelated constructs
3. Can’t look at a personality
construct without considering the test that claim to measure it.
4. High scorers are unlikely to
think analytically and are not psychologically minded
-rarely see or reflect
upon relationships among thoughts, feelings, and actions
d. Other ways of testing
1. An experimental study by Richard
Lane and his colleagues at the University of Arizona
-subjects were asked to
match verbal or nonverbal stimuli with verbal or nonverbal emotional responses
-Higher scores show that
they do worse that those with lower scores.
-similar to the
Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS)
2. Revised NEO Personality Inventory
scores for five dimensions of personality
-neuroticism,
extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
3. Many people that score high on
the TAS-20 are high in general intelligence.
4. Alexithymia as Low E.I.
a. Intrapersonal Intelligence
1. the ability to access one’s own
feeling life, overlaps conceptually with two facets of the alexithymia
constructs and with emotional awareness
-defined by Salovey and Mayer as one of the core capacities of E.I.
b. Interpersonal Intelligence
1. ability to read the feelings and
emotions of others
-referred to as empathy
c. Relationship between TAS-20 and Bar-On Emotional Quotient inventory
1. empirical evidence showed that alexithymia and E.I. are strong
2. James Parker and Michael Bagby, and Taylor collected data from central Ontario also
Derek Dawda and Stephen Hart at Simon Fraser
University in British Columbia
-found that three
factors of the TAS-20 correlated negatively and significantly with the five
composite scales of the EQ-i
3. People who score high on the
TAS-20 tend to score low on the EQ-i
-they feel more
inadequate and do not respect or accept themselves
-low affective
orientation
Alexithymia and
Maladaptive Coping
1. Three styles of coping
a. problem-focused or tasked-oriented coping
-think about how to
solve a similar problem in the past before reacting to it
b. emotion-oriented coping
-often won’t accept
situation and instead become angry and occupied with aches and pain
c. avoidance-oriented coping
-distract self with
other things in place of facing the problem
2. Which style of coping does a person with Alexithymia
use?
a. emotion-oriented and avoidance-oriented coping
-these styles can lead
to psychological and somatic symptoms
-are poor choices of
coping strategies
3. Affect Regulation Scale
a. Developed by Carrie Schaffer part of her Doctoral Dissertation at Yale
University
1. access the strategies people use
to cope with distressing emotional states
-showed that adults with
high alexithymia used poor methods to regulate their emotions
(usually binge on food or develop a headache)
-with low alexithymia think about and try to understand the feeling
or talk to a caring person
b. Carol Beckman used it in her Doctoral Dissertation at Fielding Institute in
California
1. Group of male parolees
-showed that those with
high alexithymia had sexual and aggressive fantasies
and behavior, and engaged in reckless activities and drank alcohol
4. High Alexithymia individuals cannot use adaptive
coping strategies
a. This includes talking and seeking emotional support from family or close
friends because they find it difficult to become emotional and share feelings
with others
Alexithymia and
Psychiatric Disorders
1. Substance Use Disorders
a. Does substance abuse cause the individual to be alexithymia?
1. yes because the substance causes
the addicts to have difficulty managing their emotions.
2. After seeking treatment and being
sober they showed improvement, but did not change the alexithymia
score significantly
b. Addicts that rely on drugs or alcohol do not see, understand, or modulate
their emotions
c. Substance-dependant individuals vary in degree to which emotions are
differentiated
1. Dr. Edward Kahantzian,
treat narcotics addicts
2. Eating Disorders
a. People with eating disorders has alexithymia
1. scores high on the TAS-20
2. more emotionally constrained and
less psychologically minded
3. Anorexia nervosa 48% to 77%
scored higher than bulimia nervosa 40% to 61%
3. Somatoform Disorders
a. Alexithymia associated with somatoform pain disorder
1. there is no evidence
2. symptoms as a result are
called defense mechanism of conversion
4. Anxiety and Depressive Disorders
a. Alexithymia is shown in somatic symptoms
1. Panic Disorder 47% to 67% high alexithymia
2. Simple phobia 12.5 %
3. OCD 13%
b. Those that develop anxiety disorder that cannot use their emotions to
activate their psychological defenses to help modulate and contain intense
emotions leads to Panic attack and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
5. Borderline Personality Disorders
a. No rates of high alexithymia among patients with
borderline personality disorder
b. Are less able to recognize facial expressions
1. Levels of Awareness Scale
developed by Richard Lane and his colleagues
2. Also show less capacity to
coordinate mixed positive and negative emotions, this means that they are
likely to misread and both their own and others’ emotions and experience difficulties
with intergrating amd
modulating emotions, characteristics that are consistent with low EI
Implications for
Treatment and Prevention
1. Drugs and Psychotherapies
2. Group Psychotherapy can reduce level of alexithymia
-shown in a group of cardiac
patients, but have residual symptoms, prone to recurrent illnesses
3. Not many studies has been conducted to find what would
work
Websites