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Description: Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by difficulty in identifying and verbally expressing emotion, limited imagination, and externally oriented thinking style. Previous empirical research has supported alexithymia reflecting deficits in emotional regulation, mainly focusing on clinical populations with psychiatric and/or psychosomatic illnesses. In the present study, we will examine the relation between alexithymia and emotional dysregulation with a potential moderating effect of self-compassion in a non-clinical group of adult subjects. Self-compassion is defined as a nonjudgmental noticing of one's suffering, which takes on the form of self-directed empathy and acceptance. While past studies have suggested the efficacy of self-compassion as an emotional regulation technique in individuals with major depressive disorder and anxiety syndrome, there has been limited insight on its influence as a stable personality trait. Alexithymia will be measured using the highly validated Toronto 20-Item Alexithymia Scale, which can be broken down into three subscales: a) Difficulty describing feelings, b) Difficulty identifying feelings, and c) Tendency to orient thinking externally (in which people have difficulty to attend to their internal emotions.) We plan to analyze these individual subscales in relation to our dependent variable, emotion dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation will be measured using the Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Short Form (DER-SF), and self-compassion will be assessed using the Self Compassion Scale (SCS) as developed by Neff. We hope to elucidate, through this study, the pattern of relation between these three phenomena.