This post is by David Preece, Ph.D., edited by James Fross, Ph.D.

How are you feeling right now?

You might find this question easy to answer, almost impossible to answer, or somewhere in between. We all have emotions, but it turns out that people differ in how well they can understand and express emotions. Way back in the 1970s, scientists invented a word for having difficulty understanding and expressing emotions, alexithymia.

The term alexithymia means “no words for emotions” in Greek. After 50 years of research, we now know quite a bit about alexithymia and why we need to be on the lookout for it.

We know that alexithymia is a trait that exists on a continuum—everyone has some level of alexithymia, whether that be a low, average, or high level. Around 10 percent of people have high enough levels of alexithymia that it causes problems. These people rarely focus attention on their emotions and have a lot of difficulty identifying and describing their emotions. People with high alexithymia still have emotions, it’s just that they tend to experience them in a more undifferentiated way—like knowing you are feeling bad, but being unsure if that negative feeling is sadness, anger, or fear.

This undifferentiated “soup” of emotion is a problem because emotions are important parts of our lives. Different emotions tell us different things, but if they all seem merged into a........

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