Our main goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of alexithymia and to develop an inventory covering a great amount of facets of alexithymia. Our approach includes self report, third-partyassessment, gestures, language, neuropsychology and neurobiology.

The BALI project – Berlin Alexithymia Inventory – has gone through four research stages within the last 19 months and is currently in phase V. We have accumulated great amounts of data and want to complement these insights into alexithymia with imaging techniques. We are conducting two fMRI experiments (N = 100) in order to investigate differences in emotional processing between subjects low and high on alexithymia. Our key question is whether subjects with alexithymia have only difficulties expressing emotions compared to controls, or if there are differences regarding their experience of emotions.