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The authors emphasize the physiological components of alexithymia, making the point that, from Sifneos's original characterization, alexithymics would be expected to experience the physical components of stress but not the emotional ones. From this perspective, the authors hypothesize that alexithymia should be related to the degree of “experience and expression of physical signs and symptoms” and not necessarily to psychosomatic disorders, which have been linked to alexithymia in previous studies. In this study, three groups of subjects were compared: somatizing inpatients complaining mainly of chronic unsubstantiated pain; psychiatric outpatients, complaining of a variety of intrapsychic, interpersonal, and vocational conflicts; and controls comprised of patients undergoing routine dental examinations. The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and the scored version of the Archetypal 9 Test (SAT9) were used to measure alexithymia; additionally, the Basic Personality Inventory and various subscales of the MMPI were administered, and physicians were asked to quantify the organic basis of the somatizing patients' complaints. The best predictor of alexithymia as measured by the TAS was the tendency to report signs and symptoms; neither somatization nor other psychiatric disorder was significantly related to TAS alexithymia score, nor was the physician estimate of organicity related to the somatizing patients' TAS scores. Thus, the authors suggest that alexithymia is part of a response set to trauma and is not related to actual physical disorder. The authors note that the correlation between TAS score and tendency to report signs and symptoms derives mainly from the first two TAS factors: ability to identify and distinguish bodily sensations from feelings, and ability to communicate feelings—thus, these may be correlated because they in fact both measure the reporting of signs and symptoms. Alternatively, they propose a relationship through a common factor of depression sinc