Clinical Trial: Neurobiological, Neuropsychological,Linguistic and Gestural Processes and Phenomena in Individuals With Alexithymia

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Unknown status
Study Type: Observational

Official Title: Understanding Alexithymia

Brief Summary:

The syndrome of extremely restricted emotional competence, alexithymia, was originally conceptualized in psychoanalytic research and is now empirically and experimentally studied in clinical psychology and psychological medicine within the context of emotion regulation using neuroscientific techniques. Alexithymia refers to an individual's inability or impaired ability to name or express feelings and to distinguish them from the physical consequences of an acute or chronic stress reaction. Modern "brain-body-interface" research suggests that alexithymia represents a complex deficiency in cognitive processing and emotional regulatory processes. The neurobiological basis is assumed to be a preconscious, automatic and involuntary information transfer to the amygdalae of acquired representations of emotional contents stored in ventromedial prefrontal cortical areas.

Alexithymia is not just "emotional coldness", i.e. a limited emotionality, but essentially the detachment of feelings from language. In alexithymia the link between affective phenomena and language, understood as media-supported sign practices, is insufficient or even absent.

The purpose of our observational study is to better understand the neurobiological and neuropsychological as well as linguistic and gestural processes and determinants of this phenomenon

Detailed Summary:
Sponsor: Charite University, Berlin, Germany

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Information By: Charite University, Berlin, Germany

Dates:
Date Received: January 27, 2009
Date Started: February 2009
Date Completion: December 2009
Last Updated: January 27, 2009
Last Verified: January 2009