The Correlation Among Alexithymia, Conflict Coping Styles And Quality Of Intimate Relationship Of Young People

The traits of Alexithymia has close connection with some mental illness, personality disorders and physical diseases. A survey in 2014 showed that the extreme trait of Alexithymia has the prevalence rate of 10% in the crowds, which was called part of’The personality of the age’. As a characteristic or a construct of personality, it has three main features:the difficulty of identifying feelings;the difficulty of describing feelings; externally oriented cognitive style.The cause is related to unadapted cognitive processing and regulation of emotion, as well as unsafe type attachment. This study is to explore the relation between the trait of Alexithymia and the quality of close relationship in the crowd of young people aging from 20 to 35,intervened by the model of Rahim’s five conflict coping styles to inspect whether high-Alexithymia leads to low quality of close relationship by reducing the use of helpful conflict coping styles or increasing the styles that lower the quality. The study will make more understanding of the mechanism of function from Alexithymia to close relationship, make the theory of Alexithymia more comprehensive and the practice more reasonable.This study investigated 277 young people aging from 20 to 35 by using Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS-20), the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-Ⅱ, Intimate elements scale, Intimate relationship satisfaction scale. With statistical analysis, the results display:1. The integrating coping style has stably positive correlation with intimate interaction and satisfaction, negative correlation with Alexithymia; The Alexithymia score is positively correlated to the avoiding coping style and negatively to intimate interaction and satisfaction; And there is no significant correlation between avoiding coping style and intimate interaction and satisfaction.2. The integrating coping style, Alexithymia, the avoiding coping style and the duration are predictors for intimate interaction; The intimate interaction, the integrating coping style and the difficulty of identifying feelings are predictors for intimate satisfaction.3. The integrating coping style mediates between Alexithymia and intimate interaction partly,but the avoiding style doesn’t show mediating function. Intimate interaction is a mediator between Alexithymia and intimate satisfaction and the integrating also mediates between the difficulty of identifying feelings and intimate satisfaction.In general, the trait of Alexithymia of persons’ personality may hinder them from using more rational solutions to the conflicts in intimate relationship, which may lead to big problem lasting for long time or insolute conflicts happening frequently, contributing to low quality of intimate relationship, including of both intimate interaction and satisfaction.