20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale: Do difficulties describing feelings assess proneness to shame instead of difficulties symbolizing emotions?

A hallmark of alexithymia is the difficulty putting emotional states into w ords which has to be differentiated from problems to communicate emotion to others. Shame proneness is a personality trait that is expected to be clos ely related to a reduced emotional self-disclosure in social interactions. The present investigation was conducted to examine construct validity of th e Difficulties Describing Feelings scale of the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). The TAS-20 was administered to 68 subjects (30 psychiatric inpatients and 38 normals) along with the Levels of Emotional Awareness Sc ale (LEAS), a direct measure of the ability to express feelings verbally, a nd the Shame-Guilt-Scale. Difficulties Describing Feelings was associated w ith shame assessing scales but not with guilt assessing scales or the LEAS. Thus, in view of our data one should be cautious in interpreting scores fr om the TAS-20 scale Difficulties Describing Feelings as indices of a diffic ulty to symbolize one's emotions. Instead, this TAS-20 scale seems to evalu ate aspects of social shame.