Adolescents with high alexithymia heard porridge and foolishness in the Russian words for dizziness symptoms
- Elena Gorobets of Kazan Federal University studied 100 Russian-speaking adolescents aged 13 to 17, 50 with high alexithymia and 50 with low, measured with the Russian version of the Alexithymia Questionnaire for Children. They described dizziness in their own words and explained descriptors from an adult dizziness questionnaire in four blocks: vertigo, presyncope, balance disorder and postural phobic dizziness.
- Free descriptions came from 42 low-alexithymia and 34 high-alexithymia teenagers, with 8 and 16 refusals. In both groups the usual definition was that dizziness is when your head spins, and fear of falling was the description they reached for most often.
- In the high-alexithymia group only 3 of 50 could explain how general weakness differs from a change in blood pressure, and only 16 of 50 explained "legs giving way" (nogi podkashivayutsya) correctly; seven linked the verb to kasha, porridge. Most misread nausea, which the author puts down to not knowing the word's meaning more than to lacking the experience; durnota was often read as bad behaviour or stupidity.
- The analysis produced a four-block dizziness questionnaire for adolescents with high alexithymia, with plainer descriptors: "fear of falling" in place of "legs giving way", zatormozhennost' (sluggishness) in place of a phrase about slowed thinking, and "general feeling unwell". The author reports that it passed linguistic validation and approbation.
"Durnota – that's low intelligence in someone," a 15-year-old answered, and then objected: how could you feel that when your head is spinning? Durnota is the ordinary Russian word for the faint, queasy state of some dizziness; the journal's English keywords render it "lightheadedness". The boy heard durnoy, the adjective for bad or foolish.
The answer comes from a paper by Elena Gorobets, a linguist at Kazan Federal University who also runs the university clinic's speech pathology centre. She worked with 100 adolescents aged 13 to 17: 50 with high alexithymia, 50 with low, measured with the Russian version of the Alexithymia Questionnaire for Children. Each described any dizziness they had felt, then explained descriptors from an adult dizziness questionnaire in four blocks – vertigo, presyncope, balance disorder, postural phobic dizziness – and said whether each fitted them. The paper is a linguistic study of symptom words, and metaphor comes up in it once.
Porridge, toxins and camels
Free descriptions came from 42 teenagers in the low-alexithymia group and 34 in the high group; 8 and 16 declined, lacking either the words or the experience. Nobody declined to interpret the ready-made descriptors. In both groups the typical definition was circular – dizziness is when your head spins – and follow-up questions mostly showed that the state described was something else.
With high alexithymia, the noun golovokruzhenie said little, while the phrase golova kruzhitsya, "the head is spinning", worked. Vertigo items went best. These teenagers could say which way things turned, but disputed that the body spins and not the head: the word, they said, is head-spinning, not body-spinning.
Presyncope was harder. Only 3 of 50 could explain how general weakness differs from a change in blood pressure. Nausea was "a kind of… process when toxins come out of you. Through the mouth" (I., 13), or a stomach illness from unwashed hands. Low-alexithymia teenagers took the same word to boredom over seven lessons' homework, or to a state "like shame". The high group, the author writes, makes no such metaphorical transfer.
Only 16 of 50 explained nogi podkashivayutsya, "the legs are giving way"; seven connected the verb with kasha, porridge. Pustota, "emptiness", led to a desert with camels, to outer space, to an empty head over homework.
Before writing "denies"
The Russian bedside vocabulary for dizziness is figurative. Podkashivat' is what a scythe does to grass; durnota grows from the adjective for bad. Adult speakers stopped hearing the scythe long ago, and the phrase works as a label. A teenager with high alexithymia hears the root, or a neighbouring word, and answers another question. On nausea, the author traces the misreadings to the word more than to missing experience. On "noise in the head or ears" she suspects the opposite: the teenagers had probably never felt it.
The revised questionnaire swaps images for plain statements: "fear of falling", "I walk unsteadily", "unusual sensations in my head and body, I can't explain". Any number of items can be ticked, and several types of dizziness may coexist.
When an adolescent gives a strange answer to a symptom word, ask what the word means to them before charting the symptom as absent, then ask again in verbs: is your head spinning, are you afraid of falling.
A clinical word that a teenager hears as porridge or foolishness has asked him about something other than his dizziness.
The paper reports counts and quotations for each descriptor, without statistical comparison between the groups, and does not give the score used to divide high from low alexithymia. The revised questionnaire is printed in full; the author states that it passed linguistic validation and approbation. Quotations are our translation from the Russian original, published under CC BY 4.0.