No convincing evidence for a mediated effect of childhood trauma on alexithymia among patients with depression: A reevaluation of Zhou et al. (2026)

Using the covariance matrix reported by Zhou et al., we reexamined the evidence underlying their proposed mediation model linking childhood trauma and alexithymia in individuals with depression. Our analyses show that the same covariance structure is equally compatible with a conceptually distinct latent-variable framework that does not require the directional pathway advanced in the original study. In this competing model, self-reported childhood trauma, sleep disturbances, anhedonia, and alexithymia are viewed as manifestations of a broader latent factor, core self-evaluation. The findings highlight a general challenge in the interpretation of observational data: the same pattern of associations may often be accounted for by multiple theoretically plausible models. Consequently, correlational evidence alone offers limited justification for privileging one explanatory account over others. Consideration of alternative models should therefore constitute a standard component of efforts to infer psychological mechanisms from observational findings.