Health Locus of Control and Type D Personality/The Distressed Personality of Depressed and Non Depressed Males

INTRODUCTIONHealth locus of control derived from the social learning theory states that an individual learns on the basis of the history of reinforcement and develops general and specific expectancies. In other words, the belief is that certain outcomes are a result of their action (internals) or a result of other forces independent of themselves (externals). His belief of health determined or not determined by his own behavior is measured by health locus of control (HLC) scale. The scale is the degree to which individuals believe that their health is controlled by internal or external factors.Personality factors may have much explanatory power of differences in outcome, as indicated by recent research on Type D personality / distressed personality. Type D personality covers two personality traits of negative affectivity and social inhibition. It is independently associated with increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. Both men and women suffer from depression, though women are more likely suffer more than men. Type D denotes those individuals who experience increased negative distress and who do not express these negative emotions in social interactions (Denollet, 2000). Type D personality defines those who tend to experience increased negative distress and who do not express these negative emotions in social interactions and it has been associated with a variety of emotional and social difficulties (Denollet, 1991). In other words, the type D concept suggests that the way people cope with negative emotions may be as important as the experience of negative emotions per se (Pedersen, & Denollet, 2003)The people who have negative affectivity tend to feel unhappy, tend to worry, and are easily irritated. How people cope with these emotions during social interactions may be another determinant of stress-related disease ( Lovallo, Thomas, 2000). The individuals who have social inhibition tend to inhibit the outward signs of inner feelings as a strategy for down regulating emotion (McEwen, & Sapolsky, 1995). The purpose of the present study is to assess health locus of control and type D personality of depressed and non- depressed peopleOBJECTIVESTo assess health locus of control and type D personality of depressed and non depressed males by using suitable scales and ii) To assess compare health locus of control and type D personality of the depressed and the non depressed males.METHODDesignCross survey design was used for the study. The patients, who had the symptoms of depression, and accompanying patients (normal subjects) for other mental illness, served as sample.Sample: Thirty three depressed male patents and 33 normal subjects were taken for the present study. The depressed patients who came to the department of psychiatry for getting treated for depressive disorder and the non depressed (normal subjects) who were accompanying with patients of different disorders were taken as sample for the study. The depressed patients had symptoms of tension, irritability, crying spells, sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, forgetting, hopelessness, fatigability, suicidal ideas and terminal insomnia.Materials1. Health Locus Control Scale (HLC): The scale developed by Wallston, Kaplan & Maides (2003) consisted of 11 statements. This scale predicted the health related behavior of an individual. The scale had five internal and six external statements of Likert type. The external items had options, 1= strongly disagree, 2= disagree, 3 sometime disagree, 4= sometime agree, 5= agree, and 6= strongly agree and the internal items were scored reversely. The test - retest reliability was = 0.71.2. Type- D personality scale: The 14-Item type-D personality scale (DS14) consisted of 2 subscales: negative affectivity (the tendency to experience negative emotions) and social inhibition (the tendency to inhibit the expression of emotions in social interaction). …