TAS-20 Alexithymia Screener

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale is a free twenty-question self-assessment measuring how easily you identify, describe and reflect on your own emotions. It takes about five minutes, it is for ages sixteen and up, and your report is private and sent to you by email.

What alexithymia is

Alexithymia is difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. The word means, roughly, "no words for feelings".

It is not an absence of emotion. People with high alexithymia feel things fully, often intensely. What is harder is the step in between: turning a physical state into a named feeling you can think about and say out loud. The familiar version is knowing something is wrong and feeling it clearly in the body - tight chest, churning stomach, restlessness, exhaustion - without being able to say whether it is anger, fear, sadness or hunger.

It is a trait rather than a disorder. Everyone sits somewhere on it, and it occurs alongside many conditions rather than constituting one of its own.

What the TAS-20 is

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale was developed by Graeme Taylor, Michael Bagby and James Parker, and the twenty-item version was published in 1994. It is the standard measure of alexithymia in research worldwide, translated into dozens of languages and used in several thousand studies.

Twenty statements, each rated from 1 to 5, giving a total between 20 and 100. The items load onto three subscales, scored separately as well as together. Five items are reverse-scored, so answering quickly without reading carefully will distort the result more than it would on most questionnaires.

Which alexithymia screener should you take

There are two on this site and they do different jobs.

The TAS-20 is the validated one. If you want a result that a clinician will recognise, that has established thresholds behind it, and that sits on three decades of research, take this one.

The OAQ-G2 is the more detailed one. Thirty-seven items across seven dimensions rather than three, including areas the TAS-20 does not cover at all - such as how emotional processing plays into relationships and intimacy. It does not carry the same validation history, so read it as a richer picture rather than a measurement.

Taking both is reasonable. Start here if you only take one.

Why it matters for autistic adults

Alexithymia is common in autism - research reviews put clinically significant alexithymia at around half of autistic people, against roughly one in ten in the general population.

That overlap matters more than it first appears. A substantial body of research finds that difficulties long attributed to autism itself, including trouble recognising emotion in others and the reduced empathic response the stereotype rests on, track with alexithymia rather than with autism. Autistic people without alexithymia do not show them to the same degree.

Which is to say that the most damaging assumption made about autistic people is substantially a description of a different trait that got attached to the wrong label. Knowing which of the two you actually have is worth the five minutes.

The three areas

Difficulty identifying feelings - scored 7 to 35

Seven items on knowing that something is happening without being able to name which emotion it is, and on telling an emotion apart from a physical sensation. This is the core of the construct and usually the subscale people recognise first.

Difficulty describing feelings - scored 5 to 25

Five items on putting a feeling into words for somebody else. This comes apart from the first area more often than people expect, and the distinction matters in a relationship: not knowing what you feel is a different problem from knowing and being unable to hand it over.

Externally-oriented thinking - scored 8 to 40

Eight items on a cognitive style oriented toward facts, events and external detail rather than inner states. See the note below - this subscale needs reading with more care than the other two.

How it is scored

Your total runs from 20 to 100, in three bands. These are the standard published cut-offs.

No alexithymia - 20 to 51

Your answers suggest a generally clear and accessible relationship with your emotional life.

Possible alexithymia - 52 to 60

A borderline range, with some difficulty in one or more areas.

Alexithymia present - 61 to 100

A meaningful pattern of alexithymic traits, at the level that research uses to identify high alexithymia. Read this as a trait level rather than as a condition you have been found to have - alexithymia is not a diagnosis, and no questionnaire confers one.

A note on externally-oriented thinking

Of the three subscales, this is the one to hold most loosely. It has consistently shown the weakest statistical properties across studies, and there is ongoing debate about whether its items behave the same way in autistic respondents as in anyone else.

A preference for facts and external detail is a genuine cognitive style, and for many autistic people it is a strength rather than a symptom of anything. If your total is pushed above a threshold mainly by this subscale, with the first two areas low, that is worth noticing before drawing any conclusion from the number.

What this screener is not

This assessment is for information and self-reflection only. It is not a diagnostic tool and does not replace professional medical or psychological evaluation.

High alexithymia also occurs with depression, anxiety, PTSD and eating disorders, and it can rise temporarily under stress or during burnout - which means a high score taken at a difficult moment may not describe your baseline. It tells you something is happening in how you process emotion. It does not tell you why.

What happens after you finish

You receive your total, all three subscale scores and a report by email. Nothing is shared with anyone unless you ask us to send it somewhere. If you would like to talk the result through, you can tell us at the end and we will follow up.

Working with us

We offer an alexithymia evaluation as an add-on to a full assessment, which places a measure like this one in the context of your history and current circumstances rather than reading it alone.

We also provide adult autism assessment, ADHD assessment, dual assessment for both, and an add-on evaluation for demand avoidance. If you need documentation rather than a diagnosis, our page on neuroaffirming accommodations explains that process.

You can also meet the clinicians, read our frequently asked questions, or browse the rest of our free tools on the self-discovery page.

About Adult Autism Assessment

We assess and support neurodivergent adults - people seeking a first diagnosis in adulthood, people who have known for years and want documentation, and people who are still working out what fits. Our approach is neurodiversity-affirming: an assessment here is about accurate self-understanding and practical accommodation, not about finding out what is wrong with you.

Adult Autism Assessment is part of New Path Family of Therapy Centers, Inc.