Increasing age may lead to the onset of illness, posing one form of psychological stress that may elicit a variety of coping reactions. Our objective is to explore the relationship between different aspects of coping to emotional distress in middle-aged and older adult patients without cognitive impairment from two Western Australia hospitals. Coping was assessed with the Coping with Health Injuries and Problems Scale (CHIP) 1, 2 while emotional state was assessed with three scales from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI),3 namely anxiety, depression, and somatization. We predicted stronger associations of emotion-focused coping with all three measures of emotional distress. Hierarchical regression analysis using the PAI subscales as criteria indicated Emotional Preoccupation Coping as being consistently associated with the domains of emotional state. The Coping scales consistently showed more predictive utility than demographic and health status measures. Other results are discussed in terms of the relationships between physical and mental health status in the process of adjusting to illness or injury.
The Parental Bonding Instrument was administered to 49 schizophrenic out‐patients attending a depot injection clinic. Subjects were instructed to rate each of their parents as they remembered them in their first 16 years. Principal components analyses followed by orthogonal varimax rotations were performed separately for mothers and fathers. The results suggested that the instrument is measuring two dimensions of parental characteristics; namely, care and overprotection. The findings lend further support to the internal structure of the instrument. The implications of the results for the prediction of relapse in schizophrenics and the expressed emotion construct are discussed.
Abstract Validation of the Minnesota Percepto-Diagnostic Test (MPD) for use with psychiatric patients was attempted, using two different approaches. In the first, three groups of 82 patients each, matched for sex, age, and education and diagnosed as having either brain damage, an affective disturbance, or other psychiatric diagnosis, were compared on the number of degrees of rotation, the recommended MPD score. No differences among groups were found. In the second approach, MPD scores for 124 unselected psychiatric patients were correlated with scores on the Symbol Digit Modalities Test, another screening test for brain damage. The correlation was not significantly different from zero. It was concluded that, when age and education are controlled, the MPD cannot discriminate between brain-damaged and non-damaged psychiatric patients.
Increasing age is accompanied by increased incidence and comorbidity of various chronic diseases. Many of these conditions, such as cardiovascular and kidney disease, can lead to declines in cognitive functioning. A simple additive effect may be commonly assumed. We here evaluate the hypothesis that such effects may be multiplicative/interactive rather than simply additive, resulting in disproportionate decrements in performance on tests of different cognitive functions. Participants were the 1,782 Canadians aged 65 years and older who completed the clinical assessment of the national Canadian Study of Health and Aging and who were without dementia. Participants were categorized as having either kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, neither, or both. Scores on a measure of verbal fluency showed the predicted interaction effects, but not in the predicted pattern of worst performance in the group with both disorders. Reasons for the relative lack of observed main effects of disease and multiplicative interactions, such as the exclusion of people with dementia and nature of the sample from the community, are discussed.
The specific characteristics of the Type A personality have generated a great deal of recent attention due to the prevalence of these characteristics in persons suffering from coronary heart disease. Type A individuals are more likely to be involved in serious accidents and experience more secondary complications when faced with serious illness. They are also less apt to incorporate appropriate coping strategies to help deal with pain and discomfort, or to enlist the help of others for such purposes. These studies are particularly interesting for those involved in health care, as such personality characteristics may influence health and healing. The present study examines the Type A personality construct and marital intimacy in a sample of 34 lower extremity amputees. The Survey of Work Styles (SWS) was used to measure Type A behaviour patterns, and the Waring Intimacy Questionnaire (WIQ) to assess the marital relationship. When compared to a group of age‐ and sex‐matched controls, lower extremity amputees showed higher prevalence of some Type A behaviour patterns, and, in males, lower levels of marital intimacy. The low return rate of questionnaires in this study limits its generalizability, but results remain consistent with predictions for Type A behaviour patterns.
To assess attitudes towards personal ageing among Australian psychologists.Six hundred and four practising psychologists were surveyed using the Reactions to Ageing Questionnaire (RAQ). Potential predictors of attitudes to ageing, such as age, gender and number of years in clinical practice were examined, together with the amount and quality of contact with older family members and older friends. Measures related to the training of psychologists were also of interest.The strongest significant predictors of attitudes to ageing were respondents' age and positive attitudes towards conducting therapy with older clients. Contact and training variables were not associated with scores on the RAQ.These results highlight age as a contributing factor in attitude formation.
Johan A. Landmark, a Canadian scientist and clinical psychiatrist of Norwegian origin, directed a large scale investigation on a sample of 120 Canadian schizophrenic patients that were rated on 87 symptoms relevant for the assessment of schizophrenia and on a multitude of sociodemographic and case history variables in order to determine if specific statistical symptom patterns would emerge as computerized clinical predictors of response to psychiatric medication, or how the symptom patterns would relate to sociodemographic variables such as gender, education, birth-order, and age.The specific symptoms and other patients' variables that significantly correlated with outcomes of psychiatric medication were entered in a statistical regression equation as mathematical predictors for future pharmacological treatments.With respect to outcomes of fluphenazine treatment at that time, the best predictor was a triad of symptoms including auditory hallucinations, passivity feelings, and disturbances of affect.This statistical approach needs to be replicated for novel antipsychotics and substances such as cannabidiol to generate statistically based predictions of which medication is the best for the individual patient with his or her particular symptom pattern, to avoid the prevalent lengthy and frustrating "trial and error" routines in daily clinical psychiatry.The various symptoms of schizophrenia in Landmark's sample were not strongly related to any sociodemographic variables: this supports biopsychiatric concepts of schizophrenia as opposed to those based on psychosocial factors.
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