Interrater Agreement when Assessing Alexithymia Using the Drawing Completion Test (Wartegg Zeichentest)

Due to insufficient agreement regarding the definition of the concept of alexithymia, a number of theoretically different approaches have been used when assessing the phenomenon. Primarily psychiatric interviews and questionnaires have been used, but also projective tests, principally the TAT, and the Rorschach. In this study four independent assessments of alexithymia were made, using the Wartegg, for a cohort of 50 randomly selected subjects, acting upon the alexithymia description of von Rad. Intraclass correlations were on an average 0.77.