Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ-S) Test

For readers who want to understand recurring difficulty with their own feelings, the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ-S) Test offers a focused way to examine emotional awareness and communication. An alexithymia self-assessment can help when emotions feel vague, hard to name, or easy to dismiss. The result gives a concise profile of the tendency represented by these questions, supporting reflection on how you experience and express feelings.

What This Assessment Measures

The questionnaire examines how readily a person notices, distinguishes, and describes emotions. Its items cover unpleasant feelings such as sadness, anger, and fear, alongside pleasant experiences such as happiness, excitement, and amusement. They also ask whether feelings receive attention or are ignored. This makes the emotional awareness test relevant when inner states feel unclear or difficult to communicate.

The result is organised around one displayed scale:

• The Alexithymia Scale, scored from 6-42, measures difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Lower difficulty covers 6-17, Moderate difficulty covers 18-29, and Higher difficulty covers 30-42; higher scores indicate greater impairment in emotional awareness and emotional communication.

Scores describe the difficulty captured by the items, not a permanent identity or complete account of emotional functioning. The result is most useful as a current self-report profile, read alongside situations in which emotions become hard to recognise, name, or attend to.

Methodology and Evidence Base

Each statement is answered on a seven-point agreement scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with a neutral midpoint. The method for converting responses into the displayed score is unspecified; results are interpreted through the displayed bands without inferring item weights or a summation rule.

The structure is consistent with the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire-Short Form (Preece et al., 2023), a brief published measure of alexithymia. It also aligns conceptually with the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire and its attention-appraisal model, which distinguish attending to feelings from identifying and describing them. This PAQ-S questionnaire is conceptually consistent with that work, not presented as a separately validated adaptation of the published instruments.

Research on the source measure includes psychometric evaluation and a later study in a clinical sample, giving the published PAQ-S a defined evidence base. That evidence belongs to the published measure, while this online presentation should be read as a self-report profile rather than as a newly standardised instrument. Current mood, context, self-awareness, and willingness to report inner experience can shape answers, so persistent or disruptive difficulties may require broader assessment.