People who struggle to put feelings into words may regulate others’ emotions differently

Two smartphone diary studies in Germany and the United States found that different facets of alexithymia were linked to how people try to manage other people’s emotions, sometimes in opposite directions.

Alexithymia is a personality trait with three facets:

• difficulty identifying one’s own feelings

• difficulty describing feelings to others

• an externally oriented thinking style that focuses on external events rather than inner states

Higher levels have been linked to a more detached interaction style, greater difficulty recognising others’ emotions, and lower social functioning. How alexithymia translates into strained relationships is less clear.

Eva Geiger and colleagues examined one possible pathway, extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, meaning deliberate attempts to influence how someone else feels. They drew on the extended process model of extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation. In this model, a regulator first identifies another person’s emotion, then selects a strategy, then implements it.

Two studies in daily life

Study 1 followed 129 adults in Germany for seven days in 2021, with three prompts a day. Study 2 followed 220 adults in the United States for ten days in 2022. Together they contributed 6,028 observations. People with clinical levels of anxiety or depression, or very high alexithymia scores, were excluded. At each prompt, participants described their most emotionally intense social interaction since the last survey. They rated how much they had used each of 15 strategies, from avoidance and distraction through problem solving, reappraisal and co-rumination to touch, soothing and validation. Analyses controlled for how close participants felt to the other person.

The team expected higher alexithymia to go with less use of engagement strategies such as validation and soothing, and more use of disengagement strategies such as avoidance and distraction.

What they found

The picture was more complicated, and it depended on the facet.

• Difficulty describing feelings went with lower use of strategies. In Study 2 it was negatively associated with all 15. In Study 1 it was negatively associated with six strategies, but these did not survive correction for multiple tests.

• Difficulty identifying feelings went with higher use of many strategies in Study 2. This covered 12 of the 15, including avoidance, distraction, problem solving, reappraisal, co-rumination and touch. It was not linked to social support, soothing or validation. In Study 1 it was not significantly associated with any strategy.

• Externally oriented thinking showed no consistent pattern across the two studies.

Because the facets pulled in different directions, results for the overall alexithymia score depended on which facet dominated in each sample. Overall scores were mostly negatively associated with strategy use in Study 1 and more positively in Study 2.

Making sense of it

The authors suggest the facets may map onto different stages of the process. Difficulty identifying feelings may matter most when recognising another person’s emotion and choosing a response. Speculatively, people with this difficulty may focus on the thoughts, interpretations or problems around an emotional situation rather than on the emotion itself. Difficulty describing feelings may matter most when carrying a strategy out, since many interpersonal strategies depend on putting emotions into words.

They note that other research suggests people on the receiving end tend to prefer emotion-oriented support, and that reframing can feel less validating than explicitly emotional responses. The more cognitive, problem-focused pattern linked to difficulty identifying feelings may therefore fit with a more distant interaction style. The authors also caution that treating alexithymia as a single score can hide opposing effects.

Limitations

The samples did not include people with very high alexithymia. Overall alexithymia was highly correlated with two of its facets, so the facet results should be read as partly overlapping markers. Some subscales had low reliability, notably externally oriented thinking in Study 1 (α = .47). All reports came from the person doing the regulating, so the authors call for studies that also capture the other person’s perspective. Both studies were preregistered, and the data and code are openly available.

Reference: Geiger, E. J., Ditzer, J., Joormann, J., Barnow, S., & Pruessner, L. (2027). Alexithymia and everyday interpersonal emotion regulation. Personality and Individual Differences, 265, Article 114103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.114103