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Over the past thirty-five years I have
been devising theoretical models for psychosomatic medicine and conducting research
on alexithymia and emotion regulation. During the 1980's I advanced a dysregulation
model of disease, which was based on a synthesis of contemporary psychoanalytic
ideas and observations with recent findings from neurobiology and developmental
psychobiology. My research has focused on one component in this model, namely,
deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotions. My colleagues
and I developed the self-report Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and an improved
twenty-item version (the TAS-20), and conducted a series of studies which yielded
considerable empirical support for the validity of the alexithymia construct.
We also investigated the relationship between alexithymia and certain medical
and psychiatric illnesses, which we have conceptualized as disorders of affect
regulation. In other studies, we have investigated relations between alexithymia
and emotional intelligence and the five factor model of personality; we have also
collaborated with colleagues in some experimental studies which examined relations
between alexithymia and various aspects of emotional processing. More recently
we developed the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA); the reliability
and validity of this instrument have been demonstrated in Dutch, German, and Italian translations of the instrument.
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