Abstract
Alexithymia has been shown to be related to many psychosomatic disorders including a number of chronic pain conditions. A lot of previous studies have found the correlations between alexithymia and several pain-related measures, such as pain intensity, prevalence, depression, anxiety, and illness behavior. However, their causality and underlying mechanism remain unclear. It is suggested that alexithymia is a disturbance in cognitive processing and emotional regulation that may cause and exacerbate somatic symptoms, social pain and illnesses through physiological, cognitive, behavioral, and social pathway. In this article, we review the findings from previous studies on relationship between alexithymia, emotional regulation and pain and then discuss management of alexithymic patients with chronic pain.
