Abstract
A self-administered questionnaire that would indicate a person's perception of his or her habitual defensive style was constructed and tested. The hypotheses assessed were that defenses cluster so as to constitute "styles" and that these styles can be ranked as more or less adaptive. The sample comprised 98 psychiatric patients and 111 nonpatients. The tools used were (1) a questionnaire measure of self-appraisal of defensive style, (2) a questionnaire measure of ego adaptation, and (3) a sentence completion measure of ego development. The results, which argued strongly for the validity of a questionnaire measure of perceived defensive style, also showed that such defenses tend to cluster into styles that can be ranked on a developmental continuum, from "maladaptive action patterns," through "image-distorting" defenses, "self-sacrificing" defenses, and "adaptive" defenses.
Keywords
Related Publications
Moving against the world: Life-course patterns of explosive children.
Do ill-tempered children become ill-tempered adults? What are the life-course consequences of such an explosive interactional style? What processes can account for the persisten...
Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology.
Psychology needs a metric for positive mental health that would be analogous to the IQ tests that measure above-average intelligence. The Defensive Function Scale of the DSM-IV ...
Nonverbal behavior, gender, and influence.
Participants viewed a videotape of either a male or female confederate delivering a persuasive message using a high task, social, submissive, or dominant nonverbal style. Partic...
Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process.
This article explores the possibility that romantic love is an attachment process--a biosocial process by which affectional bonds are formed between adult lovers, just as affect...
The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale: A Cognitive-Developmental Measure of Emotion
The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) is based on a new cognitive-developmental model of emotional experience. The scale poses evocative interpersonal situations and el...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1983
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 333-333
- Citations
- 496
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
Cite This
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1001/archpsyc.1983.01790030103013