Alexithymia among students of different disciplines

The main goal of this work is to describe a concept of alexithymia and confirm if there is a difference in the rate of alexithymia among graduate students of different disciplines. The theoretical part is focused on alexithymia and associated areas. The experimental part compares rates of alexithymia among the third-year students of Masaryk University (n = 282), namely psychology, science and medicine. TAS-20 (Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20-Item) was used for alexithymia analysis. Higher rates of alexithymia were found for life science students in comparison to psychology students. Between these two fields are students of medicine, no significant difference in score of medical students and other student groups were found. The results for selected subscales of TAS-20 were also analyzed, the difference was observed only for the subscale ‘externally oriented thinking’.