Mood as the Mediator of the Relationship Between Interoceptive Sensibility and Alexithymia

Alexithymia is a personality construct characterised by difficulties describing and identifying emotions. Alexithymia was evident to be associated with interoception, the ability to perceive and interpret internal bodily signals. There is a limited investigation on self-evaluated interoceptive sensibility aspect (IS) and its link with alexithymia and covariates. Therefore, the present cross-sectional design established the relationship between alexithymia and IS, assessed by the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (W. E. Mehling et al., 2012) and the Body Mindfulness Questionnaire (Burg et al., 2017) (N = 161). The effects of potential covariates were also examined. Our study reported the significant inverse correlation between various aspects of alexithymia and IS. Especially, based on regression models, we proposed and scrutinised “experiencing body awareness” and “trusting body awareness” as fundamental factors of IS in relation to alexithymia. Crucially, the present research claims the mediating effects of depression and anxiety on this relationship. These findings provided the new pathway to understand the interaction between IS, mood and alexithymia, thus shed light on the influence of mindful attention style and trusting attitude in IS as well as the alexithymia subtypes.<p></p>