Abstract: There are two kinds of theories to illustrate the essence and cause of alexithymia, including cognitive mechanism and social mechanism. Cognitive mechanism suggests that alexithymia incarnates the defect of the cognitive processing of emotion, involving the emotion schemas, theory of mind and executive function. While social mechanism believes that the emergence of alexithymia is associated with the early experience in the childhood and the development of alexithymia is continuously reinforced by the social culture and social relations, mainly including the social culture, social-economic status, family function and environment. Future researches should be mainly focused on the extension of research contents, such as the hot executive function, integrated researches and the proposing of systematic theory of social mechanism and so on. Researching methods should also be improved in the aspects of the measurement and research technology.

Key words: alexithymia, emotion schemas, theory of mind, executive function, social mechanism