Alexithymia test reported as three sub-scales, not one number

No, and it is not a version of it either. The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale is a copyrighted instrument, its items are not reproduced anywhere on this page, and none of the statements here is a rewording of one. What this page borrows is the part that is publishable knowledge — the three-factor structure that scale's authors identified and validated, which is a finding about how difficulty with feelings is organized rather than a piece of the questionnaire. That is why the sub-scale names will look familiar and the statements will not.

Because a total here would be a number shaped like the published one, sitting next to sub-scale names taken from the same research, and somebody would compare it with a real one they got from a clinician. That comparison would be meaningless in both directions: different items, a different number of them, a different scale length and no standardization sample. There is a second reason that has nothing to do with copyright. The three factors do not have to move together — plenty of people know precisely what they feel and cannot describe it, which is a high score on one and a low score on another — and a total averages that structure away just as it becomes interesting.

It is not, and it is the most argued-about part of the construct for exactly that reason. Externally oriented thinking describes where attention goes by default — toward mechanics, events and what happened rather than toward inner states — and that is a cognitive style with a long list of situations where it is the right one. It earns its place in the construct because someone who never turns attention inward gets little practice at identifying or naming what is there, so it is better read as a maintaining condition than as a symptom. This page keeps it separate rather than folded into a total precisely so a high score there does not contaminate the other two.

No, and the relationship between them is one of the more interesting findings in this area. Difficulty recognizing and describing emotion is often listed as an autistic trait, but a line of research argues that where the two occur together it is the alexithymia doing the work: autistic people who do not also have high alexithymia perform much like anyone else on emotion-recognition tasks, which suggests the two are separable and frequently co-occurring rather than one being part of the other. Alexithymia also appears in people with no connection to autism at all, and nothing on this page can distinguish any of these, which is a large part of why it produces no verdict.

It is the built-in weakness of every self-report scale in this area, and being aware of it is the reason for the second half. Each statement asks you to introspect on the very faculty in question, so someone who genuinely cannot tell what they feel is not well placed to report that they cannot — the scale needs the ability it is trying to measure. The scenarios are an attempt to get at the same thing sideways: instead of asking how good you are at naming feelings, they ask for two ratings and take the distance between them, which is a comparison you can make even when you do not trust either number on its own.

Because the ordinary question hides the distinction the whole word is about. Alexithymia is not an absence of feeling — the literal Greek is roughly no words for feelings, not no feelings — and people described by the term routinely report the physical side of an emotion at full strength while the name for it stays out of reach. Ask a single question and someone with a large unnamed reaction and someone with a small clearly-labeled one can give the same answer. Two sliders keep them apart, and the difference between the sliders is the only quantity on this half of the page that is worth reading.

It means two things at once and the page cannot separate them. A low rating on size-of-reaction is what you get from someone whose reaction really was small, and it is also what you get from someone who could not gauge how large their reaction was — the second is arguably the core of the construct, and it arrives as the same slider position as the first. No arrangement of these questions distinguishes the two, so the results panel states the ambiguity instead of resolving it. If that pattern is familiar and it matters to you, it is a conversation to have with someone who can watch you have a feeling rather than a number to collect from a page.