Urdu Translation and Validation of Toronto Alexithymia Scale

Alexithymia is psychosomatic phenomenon and this word was first coined by Sifneos (1973). He described it as scarcity in understanding, processing, or describing emotions. Alexithymia is a broad personality dimension having a cognitive and affective domain, which involves difficulty in recognition and identification of feelings, fantasizing and emotionalizing these feelings associated with bodily sensations of emotional arousal (Bermond et al., 2007). There are various facets of alexithymia such as behavioural, physiological and neurological on which alexithymia has been tested by focusing on individual and cultural differences (Kano & Fukudo, 2013).Alexithymia is emotional blindness and to measure this emotional blindness through a valid and reliable tool is a very controversial task. Several measures have been developed for the measurement of this construct including self-report scales (MMPI Alexithymia by Kleiger & Kinsman, 1980) and Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scales (Apfel & Sifneos, 1979) but, these scales were not considered as valid and reliable measure of alexithymia, therefore were not much empirically supported.The need for alexithymia scale was accomplished by development of Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) comprising of 20 items developed by Taylor, Bagby, and Parker (1997). They defined alexithymia on the basis of these underlying features: (a) Experiencing difficulty in identification of feelings and the associated physiological changes in the body; (b) Difficultly in the expression of emotions; (c) Constricted imagination coupled with devoid of fantasies and; (d) Externally oriented thinking style due to lack of introspective awareness. TAS-20 is considered as the most famous scale among all the other measurements of alexithymia. Research work indicated that it is a highly valid and reliable scale (Bagby, Parker & Taylor 1994). Trajanovic, Djuric, Latas, Milovanovic, and Djuric (2013) claimed that it is translated in more than 20 languages in order to validate it across cultural and language obstacles. He proposed it as a universal trait. This scale shows Alexithymia as a multidimensional construct as it comprises of three factors. These three factors are completely separate factors but, empirically related depicting difficulty in identifying feelings, difficulty in describing feelings, and externally oriented thinking patterns such as fantasizing feelings.The TAS-20 has been replicated for many samples such as students, clinical and different communities in different languages, for example, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Lithunain and Swedish etc. (Bach, Bach, de Zwaan, & Serim, 1996; Bressi et al., 1996; Lee, Rim, & Lee, 1996; Pandey, Mandal, Taylor, & Parker, 1996; Simonsson-Sarnecki et al., 2000). In these studies, TAS-20 was translated by using back translation method and its three factor structure was tested through confirmatory factor analysis. Most of these studies confirmed its three factor structure but, few studies failed to achieve this consistency especially, in the third factor (Simonsson-Sarnecki, et al., 2000). While translating TAS-20 in English language Taylor, Bagby and Parker (2003) reported low internal consistency of the third factor. The lowest Cronbach Alpha value for factor three ranged from .34 to .68 for different translations. They claimed that the third factor of TAS-20 has a large number of items, which can negatively influence an internal reliability of whole scale. This factor has more negative scoring items and these negative items can change the meaning during translation process or can be influenced by true cultural differences. The third factor assesses individuals mental processes especially reduced fantasy and imaginal activity indirectly and these processes are difficult to measure through self-report tools (Parkera, Taylorb, Bagbyc, 2003). Nevertheless, there is pertinent literature available claiming the three factor structure of the TAS-20 as a stable and replicable scale across clinical and nonclinical populations (Bagby, et al. …