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

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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 subject''s spoken and written responses to a film 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.