AN INVESTIGATION OF ALEXYTIMITY LEVELS OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN TERMS OF LONELINESS AND DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES

Abstract

In TDK “emotion” is defined as perception with senses, feeling, intuition and a unique spiritual movement or activity. Hundreds
of emoticons can be mentioned with their mixtures and variations.
From past to present, people have faced many problems in life. One of them was the inability to understand, define and explain
emotions. In order to explain such problems, the concept of alexithymia was used for the first time in 1973.
Another problem we experience in connection with emotions is loneliness. Loneliness is a feeling of being cut off from the
world with a sense of emptiness.
The main purpose of the study is to examine the alexithymia levels of high school students in terms of loneliness and
demographic variables (gender, grade, type of institution informal education, number of siblings, education status of parents,
family income and academic success) and to help eliminate the deficiency in this area. In addition, it is necessary to identify
the problems in this area and find appropriate solutions.
The research was conducted in the 2017-2018 academic year with 568 out of 3263 students in 6 different schools. However,
44 of them were excluded from the study because they were not found valid. As a result, the study group of the research consists of 524 high school students.
SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 16.0 program was used for the analysis of the findings.
It has been observed that alexithymia makes a significant difference according to gender, type of the education institution,
maternal education level, and monthly family income. In addition, it was observed that there was a positive and moderate
relationship between alexithymia and loneliness.
As a result of the research, it can be said that the alexithymia levels of high school students reveal concrete findings and
important evidence regarding the relationship between loneliness and demographic variables. In this respect, it is predicted that
the study will fill an important gap in this field.