Psychological and social aspects of disease prevention
Mohammad Hadi Yadollahpour; Danial Masoudi; Angela Hamidia; ُSoraya Khafri; Neda Ahangari; Mahbobeh Faramarzi
Abstract
Objective: Psychological defense mechanisms reflect how individuals cope with conflicts and stress. This study aimed to describes defense mechanisms in medical interns and their correlation with spiritual health.Method: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on medical students of the academic ...
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Objective: Psychological defense mechanisms reflect how individuals cope with conflicts and stress. This study aimed to describes defense mechanisms in medical interns and their correlation with spiritual health.Method: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on medical students of the academic year 2023. 168 medical interns meeting the study criteria completed two questionnaires including defense mechanisms (DSQ-40) by Andrews et al. (1993) and spiritual health Paloutzian and Ellison (1982) .The analysis was performed using SPSS.v25 software with Pearson, t-tests, and ANOVA tests.Results: The mean score of mature defense mechanisms (43.31±16.83) among medical interns was higher than immature (98.52±52.8) and neurotic (36.75±18.3) defense mechanisms. The immature defense mechanism was significantly higher in males compared to in females (99.43±23.41 vs 108.47±23.21, p=0.014). Also, the mean score of immature defense mechanisms in single individuals was significantly higher than in married ones (106.66±24.02 vs 93.12±19.56, p=0.001). The spiritual health of interns had a significant and direct correlation (r=0.249) with mature defense mechanisms and a significant negative correlation (r=-0.336) with immature defense mechanisms.Conclusion: Higher spiritual health in medical interns is associated with greater use of mature defense mechanisms and lesser use of immature defense mechanisms.Keywords: defense mechanisms, spiritual health, medical interns, mature defense, immature defense.
Ehsan Tavakolian; Hojjatollah Farahani; Parviz Azadfallah; Reyhaneh Razavi
Abstract
Objective: Somatic symptoms consist of a wide range of symptoms and until yet clustering them has been very challenging for researchers and therapists. The present study aims to explore underlying psychological factors of various functional somatic symptoms and determine if there are any similarities ...
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Objective: Somatic symptoms consist of a wide range of symptoms and until yet clustering them has been very challenging for researchers and therapists. The present study aims to explore underlying psychological factors of various functional somatic symptoms and determine if there are any similarities or differences in these factors that could help classify these symptoms as one syndrome or discrete ones.
Method: This study adopted an association rule mining method based on data mining. 643 participants were recruited using a convenience sampling technique. Data were collected using the checklist of somatic symptoms (Lacourt et al., 2013), Attachment Questionnaire (Hazan & Shaver, 2017), Defense Style Questionnaire (Andrews et al., 1993), and Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (Lane, 2006).
Results: Cognitive, gastrointestinal, and fatigue symptoms are related more to immature defense mechanisms. Musculoskeletal, respiratory, and cardiac symptoms are associated with neurotic defenses. Fatigue symptoms are associated with ambivalent attachment and musculoskeletal symptoms are related more to avoidant attachment. Indeed, it could be said that there are two clusters of somatic symptoms, one of which is attachment and the other is defense mechanisms. This supports the splitters’ view about somatic syndromes.
Conclusions: These findings show various types of somatic symptoms have qualitatively different risk factors. Our findings imply that psychotherapists should consider the kind of syndromes a patient has and their underlying psychological predispositions to manage the problem better.
