Factorial structure and psychometric properties of the German version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) of psychosomatic patients

The present paper describes the attempt to cross-validate the three-factori al structure of the German Version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale in a population of 419 patients, suffering of psychogenic disorders. Howev er, results neither revealed good internal consistencies nor was it possibl e to obtain an acceptable adaptation of the empirical data on the postulate d model. Therefore an explorative factor analysis was performed in order to get a more consistent factor model. The hereby resulting four-factorial st ructure was congruent with reference to theoretical and empirical data of a lexithymyia. However, additional crossvalidation in other populations has t o be investigated.