title: Alexithymia: an experimental study of cerebral commissurotomy patients and normal control subjects.
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 subjects' spoken and written responses to a film that 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.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D003337:Corpus Callosum / Q000502:physiology* / Q000601:surgery; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000601:surgery; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012923:Social Class; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014956:Writing