José Moral de la Rubia
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, México
Sandra Ramos-Basurto
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, México
Abstract
Research on intra-couple violence has traditionally focused on women as victims and men as aggressors when violence is often reciprocal between both members of the couple. Alexithymia is a potential risk factor for intra-couple violence due to its usually associated characteristics of insecure attachment, passive coping style, empathy deficit and emotional control difficulties. Alexithymia has been found to be closely related to depression. Taking into account this background, the aim of this paper was to study the relationship between alexithymia and suffered and exerted violence among men and women with heterosexual partners, controlling for depression. The Spanish questionnaire on suffered and exerted couple violence (Cuestionario de Violencia Sufrida y Ejercida de Pareja, CVSE, Moral de la Rubia & Ramos Basurto, 2015), the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20, Bagby, Parker & Taylor, 1994, in its Mexican version, Moral de la Rubia, 2008a) and the Beck Depression Inventory (2nd Ed., BDI-2, Beck, Steer & Brown, 1996, in its simplified Mexican application format, IDB-2-FSA; Moral de la Rubia, 2013) were administrated to a non-random sample of 240 participants (120 female and 120 male). Alexithymia correlated to violence, more to suffered violence than exerted violence, more to damage than frequency within suffered violence, and more to frequency than damage within exerted violence. Most of these correlations remained significant after controlling for depression. In a model with a close fit to the data in the total sample, alexithymia had a significant effect on suffered and exerted violence, and this effect was both directly and indirectly mediated by depression. It is concluded that alexithymia is primordially a risk factor for suffering violence from the partner and to a much lesser extent to perpetrating violence against the partner.
Keywords: Violence, Couple, Alexithymia, Depression, Mexico
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