Excessive self-focused attention and defensiveness among psychiatric patients: a vicious cycle?
The contribution of defensive coping to the phenomenon of excessive self-focused attention was studied in 20 depressed or anxious psychiatric outpatients comprising the negative affect group, 20 patients with psychotic disorders, and a control group of 21 patients of an orthopaedic clinic. Self-focused attention was assessed using the Self-reflectiveness and Internal State Awareness subfactors of the Private Self-consciousness Scale. In accordance with other research on self-focused attention, the negative affect group obtained higher scores on the Self-reflectiveness scale than the control group (t39=2.40, p<.03). To examine the relationship between self-focus and defensiveness, Weinberger, Schwartz, and Davidson's approach was employed, using median splits of short forms of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Marlowe-Crowne scale to differentiate among four groups of subjects. The highest self-reflectiveness was found for those participants who were high in both defensiveness and anxiety. This group scored higher than the nondefensive high anxious group (t30= -2.31, p<.03). The heightened self-focused attention might result from automatically instigated states of self-focused attention and paradoxical effects of defensive efforts to avoid self-focus.
Höping
Winfried
W
Psychotherapeutic Practice, Klopstockstrasse 2, D-18057 Rostock, Germany. hopingw@freenet.de
de Jong-Meyer
Renate
R
Abrams
Dominic
D
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D012928:Social Desirability; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires