ABSTRACT

Consistent research supports altered emotional processing in adult patients with anorexia nervosa (AN), including elevations in alexithymia, or deficits in identifying and describing emotions and other internal experiences. Despite increasing interest in emotion-focused therapies for AN, alexithymia is often not directly addressed within many existing treatments, and little empirical work has moved beyond descriptive, cross-sectional research. In this paper, we propose that refining the field’s understanding of alexithymia may provide insights into poor outcomes in existing psychological treatments for AN. First, we provide a brief overview of existing work exploring alexithymia in AN, and then describe several next steps in treatment-relevant research, including differentiating alexithymia from related constructs, considering neurobiological correlates of alexithymia, testing the link between alexithymia and outcome across treatment modalities, and piloting adjunctive treatment techniques focused on emotional identification and description. Altogether, exploring adjunctive treatment approaches targeting alexithymia may offer one promising possibility for improving long-term outcomes.

摘要

一致的研究支持成年神经性厌食症 (AN) 患者的情绪处理改变，包括述情障碍的升高，或识别和描述情绪和其他内部体验的缺陷。尽管对 AN 以情绪为中心的疗法越来越感兴趣，但述情障碍通常没有在许多现有治疗中直接得到解决，而且很少有实证工作超出描述性、横断面研究。在本文中，我们建议完善该领域对述情障碍的理解，可以深入了解现有 AN 心理治疗的不良结果。首先，我们简要概述了探索 AN 述情障碍的现有工作，然后描述了治疗相关研究的几个后续步骤，包括将述情障碍与相关结构区分开来，考虑述情障碍的神经生物学相关性，测试述情障碍与跨治疗方式的结果之间的联系，并试点侧重于情绪识别和描述的辅助治疗技术。总而言之，探索针对述情障碍的辅助治疗方法可能为改善长期结果提供一种有希望的可能性。