Measuring alexisomia and its relation to alexithymia using the Body Awareness Questionnaire

Abstract Background: Awareness of one’s own states is a particularly important part of cognition and emotion regulation. Difficulties in this domain is seen as the roots of several types of disorders. Impairments in perceiving emotional states has been widely documented, leading to show alexithymia - the difficulty in identifying, conceiving and communicating one's states - as a central mechanism of somatic and mental disorders. Recently, the concept of alexisomia has been used to refer to lack of awareness and expression of somatic sensations. Developing self-reported questionnaires to evaluate alexisomia represents a challenge for clinical psychology and medicine. In this context, we suggested to adapt the Body Awareness Questionnaire (BAQ, Shields et al., 1989) in France to assess alexisomia in relation to alexithymia. Methods: For this study, 610 participants completed questionnaires measuring alexithymia and alexisomia. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the BAQ can be envisaged through 4 factors as well as a unidimensional model to refer to alexisomia. We also found that body awareness was negatively related to scores of alexithymia. Conclusion: Results are discussed in light of the construct of alexisomia and its clinical implications in somatic as well as mental disorders. We suggest that alexisomia is a key concept, in the same way as alexithymia, to design treatment and prevention programs.