Personality and psychiatric treatment expectancies.

Abstract

Goldstein (1962) and Frank (1963) have emphasized the importance in the treatment process of the patient's and therapist's assumptive world. A number of authors have related certain personality variables, such as thinking introversion, to choice of medical specialty and orientation to treatment on the part of the doctor. The immediate fore-runners of the present investigation are the reports of Caine (1970), Smail (1970) and Caine and Leigh (1972), in which a test of ‘direction of interest‘, in terms of an interest in the external world rather than in the internal world of thoughts and feelings, and a test of ‘conservatism’ were found to relate to nurses' attitudes to patient care and patients' symptomatology and treatment expectancies. This report is an extension of the search for the personality variables underlying patient and therapist expectancies. A third variable, namely convergent-divergent thinking, as defined by Hudson (1966), has been added. Convergent-divergent thinking has to do with whether one prefers to converge on a single solution to a problem or whether one prefers to investigate several possible solutions. Personality variables similar to the ones with which we have been working have been described in association with these thinking types.