A Comparative Study of Alexithymia and Social Anxiety in Infertile Men and Women

Fatemeh Ghavi ¹, Leili Mosalanejad², Fariba Keshavarz ³, Masomeh Golestan Jahromi⁴, and Saeed Abdollahifrd⁵

¹Midwifery Department, College of Nursing , Shiraz  University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz , Iran.

²Research Center for Social Determinants of Health, Jahrom  University of Medical Sciences, Jahrom, Iran.

³Research committee, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, Jahrom, Iran.

⁴Research and Clinical Center, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran.

⁵Research committee, Shiraz  University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz , Iran.

Corresponding Author E-mail: Mosalanejad@jums.ac.ir

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/bbra/2400

ABSTRACT: Alexithymia and social anxiety are psychological disorders that can accompany infertility. Alexithymia is the inability to process, analyze, and regulate one's emotion, and social anxiety is the extreme fear of being scorned in social and practical situations.The objective of this study is to compare alexithymia and social anxiety in infertile men and women who visited the Infertility Center of Yazd, Iran. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study of 198 infertile couples who visited the Infertility Center of Yazd, Iran. The subjects were chosen on a convenience sampling method basis. The measuring instruments consisted of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS), a social anxiety inventory, and a demographics questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient, and regression analysis. The results show that there is not a significant difference between the means alexithymia scores of the male and female groups. However, the overall level of alexithymia is higher in women than in men (59.50(11.88) versus 59.31(10.84), p=0.90). While men had a higher level of concrete thinking disorders, women had more problems with describing and expressing their emotions. The results also show that there is not a significant difference between the means of the two groups' scores in the subcategories of social anxiety. However, the men's mean score is higher in the subcategory of avoidance (6.87(3.96) vs 6.73(4.14)), and the women have higher scores in the other two subcategories of fear (7.90(4.44) vs 7.15(4.34)) and physiology (5.90(3.88) vs 5.52 (4.38). In view of the various psychological issues that can affect infertile men and women and subsequently lead to physical, emotional, and behavioral disorders, recognizing the problems of infertility can be helpful to health policy makers in developing effective educational programs

KEYWORDS: alexithymia; social anxiety; couples; infertility

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