Alexithymia: an experimental study of cerebral commissurotomy patients and normal control subjects

Abstract

This study assessed alexithymia in six patients with complete cerebral commissurotomy, two patients with partial commissurotomy, and eight matched control subjects. Comparisons were based on content-analytic measures of the subjects' spoken and written responses to a film that symbolically represented death and loss. The commissurotomized patients were more alexithymic on all four lexical-level variables, all six sentential-level variables, and all six global-level variables. Discriminant function analysis found a linear combination of four variables that effectively discriminated groups of fully commissurotomized, partially commissurotomized, and normal control subjects and correctly classified 15 of the 16 subjects.