The central thesis of this book is that affect regulation and its failures have a major influence on mental and physical health. We have based this thesis on a synthesis of recent concepts and research findings from a broad range of disciplines, and have focused specifically on alexithymia as a deficit in the cognitive-experiential domain of emotion response systems. However, despite numerous studies on the development of emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation, and accumulating evidence supporting the validity of the alexithymia construct, a great deal more interdisciplinary research is required before the concept of disorders of affect regulation can be realized fully as a new paradigm for psychiatry and medicine.

In our reviews of empirical studies on alexithymia in previous chapters, we drew attention to some of the limitations and deficiencies in the research including the poor psychometric properties of several of the alexithymia measures, the paucity of prospective, longitudinal studies, and the need to further explore the developmental antecedents and neurobiological underpinnings of alexithymia. Of particular importance are the need (i) to extend the experimental approaches to construct validation; (ii) to investigate further the relationships between alexithymia and physiological responsiveness to emotional stimuli; (iii) to conduct large epidemiological studies to compare the prevalence of alexithymia in different cultures; and (iv) to evaluate the effectiveness of modified psychotherapy and other treatments in changing alexithymic characteristics and altering susceptibility to disorders of affect regulation or the course of existing illnesses (Salminen, Saarijärvi & Äärelä, 1995; Taylor et al., 1991).