Cigarette addiction and emotional awareness: exploring the link to alexithymia in 18-to-65-year-old adults

Introduction:
In this study, we aimed to examine the relationship between smoking addiction and alexithymia in 18 to 65-year-old adults.

Material and methods:
Our study was planned as cross-sectional. The study was conducted on a total of 160 subjects and applied a questionnaire on the sociodemographic characteristics of individuals, the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS). Data SPSS 25.0 was used for the analysis of statistical. A p-value below 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results:
The mean age of participants was 33.98 ± 10.56 and 43.8% were women. 55.6% of the participants were smokers. It was observed that 8.9% of smokers had high nicotine addiction. According to the total TAS-20 scores, 25% of the participants were alexithymic. No statistically significant correlation was found between participants’ smoking status and total and subscale scores (TAS-1, TAS-2, TAS-3) obtained from the TAS-20 scale (p = 0.41, p = 0.33, p = 0.32, p = 0.98). A statistically significant relationship was found between the FTND score of the smoking participants and the presence of alexithymia. Alexithymic smokers had significantly higher FTND scores (p = 0.042).

Disscussion:
Some researches predicted that alexithymic smokers experience more severe tobacco cravings during nicotine withdrawal. Our finding that nicotine addiction is higher in alexithymic smokers supports this finding.

Conclusions:
In our study, no direct relationship was found between smoking and alexithymia. However, a striking observation is that alexithymic smokers have higher nicotine addiction among smokers.