I had a thought about a possible connection between aphantasia and alexithymia, then went looking to see whether anyone had studied it. Several people had, and the picture is more interesting than a simple connection.
I found a 2024 paper by Merlin Monzel, Jana Karneboge, and Martin Reuter exploring affective processing in aphantasia and potential overlaps with alexithymia. Its subject is the relationship between mental imagery and recognizing emotions in ourselves and others.
A larger 2026 analysis by Maël Delem and colleagues complicates that connection in an important way. The researchers pooled five studies with 1,478 participants and distinguished complete aphantasia from hypophantasia, or weak visual imagery. Among people who could form any visual imagery, alexithymia scores declined as imagery grew more vivid. Complete aphantasics broke that pattern: their alexithymia scores did not meaningfully differ from those of typical imagers, while people with weak imagery scored higher.
That distinction gives me a better reason to keep thinking. It argues against treating aphantasia and alexithymia as a package, or assuming that less imagery always means greater difficulty understanding feelings. My question is narrower and extends into everyday conversation: what happens when someone does have difficulty identifying their feelings, little or no voluntary visual imagery, and a strong inner monologue?
I wonder whether that combination could make certain misunderstandings feel immediately convincing. That is my hypothesis, and it needs to be treated as one.
Having a feeling before having words for it
Aphantasia refers here to an absence of voluntary visual imagery: being unable to deliberately picture something in the mind’s eye. Alexithymia involves difficulty identifying or describing feelings. The studies bring those two areas into the same investigation, but the newer evidence suggests that complete aphantasia and weak imagery should not be collapsed into one category.
The distinction that interests me is between experiencing an emotion and understanding what that emotion is.
In the proposed type II model of alexithymia, emotional experience is present, while identifying, analyzing, or verbalizing it is difficult. This is a distinction within a particular research model, rather than a label I would use to diagnose someone. Research on the cognitive and affective dimensions of alexithymia describes that framework.
Someone might feel a strong reaction before being able to say whether it is hurt, embarrassment, fear, or frustration. I had wondered whether the absence of voluntary imagery could contribute to that difficulty. The newer findings make that explanation less likely as a general rule and raise the possibility that complete aphantasics use other processes to understand emotion. An overlap between traits in one person does not establish that one causes the other.
The 2026 study also has clear boundaries. It used self-report measures of imagery vividness and alexithymia, did not test inner speech or conversational misunderstandings, and drew from English- and French-speaking Western samples. It helps define what my hypothesis cannot claim; it does not answer the social question I am asking.
Hearing someone else in your own voice
Now add inner speech.
Researchers have proposed the term anendophasia for an absence of experienced inner speech. A 2024 study by Johanne S. K. Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan compared people reporting low and high levels of inner speech. My question concerns people for whom an inner monologue is a prominent part of thinking.
Imagine someone says, “Why did you do it that way?”
You repeat the sentence internally. In that repetition, you may give it the tone you would have used, attach your own assumptions, and hear an accusation: “You should have known better.”
The other person may have been asking a straightforward question. But you are already responding to the version you reconstructed.
This is the mechanism I am curious about. If the feeling is hard to identify, but the verbal explanation arrives quickly, could the explanation get accepted before the feeling gets understood? Could “I feel exposed” become “They are disrespecting me” before there is time to question it?
That could help explain a short fuse in some situations. I do not know whether this pattern is more common in people with aphantasia and alexithymia, or whether inner speech changes that relationship. It is a question worth investigating, not a conclusion about everyone who shares those traits.
Recognizing a strength without assuming superiority
My initial intuition was that having no mental pictures might leave more room for verbal thought. From there, it is tempting to jump to a claim about unusually high verbal intelligence.
I would hold that inference lightly. Thinking primarily in words does not, by itself, establish higher verbal IQ than the people around you. The inner-speech study examined particular tasks, including verbal working memory and rhyme judgments; it does not establish that aphantasia confers superior verbal intelligence.
The useful question is more personal: where does your way of thinking serve you well, and where might you trust it too quickly?
You can value your ability to reason in language while remembering that a clear sentence in your head can still be an inaccurate interpretation of another person.
Give the inner voice some kindness
The practical point I keep coming back to is self-kindness.
If your inner voice helps interpret social situations, the habits of that voice deserve attention. I suspect a voice practiced in harsh self-judgment may find harsh interpretations of other people’s words especially familiar. A kinder voice might make room for uncertainty: “That bothered me. I am still figuring out why. I can ask what they meant.”
That is a practice I find worth taking seriously, even while the larger hypothesis remains open.
Before responding, it may help to separate what was actually said from the meaning you supplied. Name the feeling as tentatively as necessary. Ask, “Were you asking about my reasoning, or suggesting I should change something?” Give the other person an opportunity to explain.
Kindness toward yourself can include acknowledging that a conversation was difficult without treating your first interpretation as a verdict. It can also include taking responsibility when your response hurt someone.
I want to understand both the strengths and the social vulnerabilities of a mind that works this way. And I want to remember that the voice I practice using with myself may influence the voice I bring to everyone else.