4 Exploring the mediating role of alexithymia in BPP 125 Simple mediation analysis using ordinary least squares path analysis shows that higher levels of BPP were related to higher levels of alexithymia (a = 0.2031, p < 0.001). For all measures of Direct SIB (past week, past year, and lifetime), depressive symptoms, and Dissociative experiences, but not for indirect SIB in the past week, there was evidence that BPP was related to their occurrence, independent of alexithymia. Regarding mediation effects, we found no indirect effect of BPP on any of the variables through its effect on alexithymia, except for depressive symptoms. Except for the latter, all bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals for the indirect effect based on 10,000 bootstrap samples included zero. See Figure 1 for a schematic representation for the results of the mediation analysis for depressive symptoms with TAS-20 as alexithymia measure. Results show that participants with higher levels of alexithymia were more prone to experience depressive symptoms (b = 0.2561, p = .002). A bias-corrected bootstrap confidence interval for the indirect effect (ab = 0.052) based on 10,000 bootstrap samples did not include zero (0.0114 to 0.1189).
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