Alexithymia is a subclinical trait involving difficulty describing and identifying emotions. It is common in a number of psychiatric conditions. Alexithymia in children is sometimes measured by parent report and sometimes by child self-report, but it is not yet known how closely related the two measures are. This is an important question both theoretically and practically, in terms of research design and clinical practice. We conducted a preliminary study to investigate this question in a sample of 6- to 11-year-old neurotypical children and their parents (N = 29 dyads). Parent and child reports were not correlated, and 93% of parents under-estimated their child’s level of alexithymia relative to the child’s self-report. Based on these results, we hypothesize that when asked to report on the child’s alexithymia, children and parents may not be reporting on the same phenomenon, and thus these two measures may not be interchangeable. These provocative findings, however, must be considered preliminary: our analyses were sufficiently powered to detect a strong relation between the two types of report had one existed, but our analyses were not sufficiently powered to distinguish between a small relation and no relation at all.

Alexithymia是一种亚临床特征，涉及描述和识别情绪的困难。在许多精神疾病中很常见。有时通过父母的报告，有时通过孩子的自我报告来衡量儿童的Alexethymia，但目前尚不清楚这两种方法之间的密切关系。就研究设计和临床实践而言，这在理论上和实践上都是一个重要的问题。我们进行了一项初步研究，以调查6至11岁神经型儿童及其父母的样本中的这个问题（ñ= 29个二元组）。父母与孩子的报告没有相关性，而且93％的父母低估了孩子相对于孩子自我报告的智力低下水平。基于这些结果，我们假设当被要求报告孩子的读写障碍时，孩子和父母可能没有报告同一现象，因此这两种措施可能无法互换。但是，这些挑衅性的发现必须被认为是初步的：我们的分析能力足以检测出两种类型的报告之间是否存在强关联，但我们的分析能力不足以区分小关系和根本没有关系。