the prevalence and intensity of alexithymia and its comparison in male and female undergraduates

aim and background: alexithymia is a psychological construct that is prevalent in a wide range of psychiatric and medical disorders. because of its importance in mental and physical health, many surveys today assess the different aspects of alexithymia in clinical and nonclinical populations. the aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of alexithymia and compare male and female students of shahid chamran university in alexithymia and its subscales. methods and materials: the study sample consisted of 841 undergraduate students of shahid chamran university. this sample was selected by multistage random sampling method from the 8000 undergraduates in the year 2008. the data collection tool was the 20-item version of toronto alexithymia scale (tas-20). to analyze data descriptive statistics, chi-square test, student’s independent t-test, and multivariate analysis of variance were used. findings: the results showed that the rate of alexithymia was 19.5% in the whole sample, 18.8% in females, and 20.2% in males. there was no significant difference in prevalence of alexithymia between male and female. comparison of the two genders in the total score and three subscales showed that there were significant differences in total score and the external oriented thinking subscale in which the averages were higher in male students (p < 0.01). conclusions: there was no difference in prevalence and intensity of difficulty in identifying and describing feelings between males and females. however, the high prevalence of alexithymia in iranian undergraduate students is an indicator of the necessity for emotional education in schools and universities.