Emotional Regulation Strategies, Alexithymia and Cravings in Alcohol Dependent Men

Emotional regulation is the ability to exert control over one’s own emotional state. The association between emotional regulation, alexithymia and cravings can be a contributing factor in alcohol use disorder. In the present work, we examined the relationship between various adaptive and maladaptive emotional regulation strategies with alexithymia and cravings in alcohol and non-alcohol dependent individuals. The study was conducted on 100 male patients with alcohol dependence along with a healthy control group of 100 males from the general population. Information was collected through the Severity of alcohol dependence questionnaire (SADQ), Emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ), Cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ), Brief experiential avoidance questionnaire (BEAQ), Toronto Alexithymia scale (TAS-20), Obsessive-compulsive drinking scale (OCDS) and General Health questionnaire (GHQ-12). The statistical analysis was done with the help oft-test and Pearson Correlation. A positive correlation was found between experiential avoidance and alexithymia (r = 0.489). A negative correlation was found between acceptance and alexithymia (r = -0.254). Cravings was found to have a positive correlation with rumination and experiential avoidance (r = 0.281, 0.382). All the observations indicate that exercises based on increasing the adaptive and decreasing maladaptive emotional regulation strategies may help in reducing cravings and alexithymia in alcohol dependence. Our study can also help in the non-pharmacological management of alcohol dependence.