People who drink a lot of coffee - and other caffeinated beverages - find it more difficult to identify and describe their own emotions. This is the claim of a new study, published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, from Australian researchers Michael Lyvers and colleagues:
Caffeine use and alexithymia in university students.
"Alexithymia" - Greek for "no words for feelings" - is the psychological terminology for an inability to put ones emotions into words. Lyvers et al did a survey study of 106 university students and found that alexithymia was correlated with the amount of caffeine consumed per day (p < 0.01, correlation coefficient r = 0.26).
As a heavy coffee drinker myself, these results caused me to feel 'surprise'. Wait, or do I mean 'sadness'? It's hard to put it into words. Anyway, it got my attention. Lyvers et al say that
Alexithymics reported consuming nearly twice as ...
