Among 193 inpatients with Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) major psychiatric disorders, the scores in Hamilton's Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) were higher among those patients with RDC schizoaffective disorder depressed type and major depressive disorder, whereas the scores in the Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) were higher among patients with these two disorders, as well as those with RDC nonaffective psychoses (schizophrenia and unspecified functional psychosis). The HRSD and SANS items were factor-analyzed, yielding nine factors that discriminated depressive and negative symptoms. These findings suggest that although depressive and negative symptoms frequently coexist, they constitute discrete syndromes.

Arousal↗

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Reliability and validity of the Japanese version of the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire among university students.

The Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) is a self-rating questionnaire, based on a general biosocial theory, for the clinical description and classification of both normal and abnormal personality variants. It was translated into Japanese and administered with the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the 10-item version of the Social Desirability Scale (SDS) to 450 university students on two occasions 2 months apart. Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficients and kappa-coefficients between TPQ scale scores for the two occasions were significantly high, as were Cronbach's alpha-coefficients of TPQ scales and subcategories at the first wave. Correlations between the TPQ scale score and GHQ and SDS scores were negligible. The TPQ thus appears to have test-retest reliability and content validity among a Japanese student population; it is uninfluenced by psychiatric morbidity or social desirability.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Grading depression severity by symptom scores: is it a valid method for subclassifying depressive disorders?

Recent diagnostic criteria such as the DSM-III-R and the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) have proposed that depression should be subcategorized according to severity. Among 75 inpatients with Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) major depressive disorder, the total number of criterion B items (N = 8) used as the measure of severity was validated against the global assessment scale (GAS) score for the worst week of the episode; the correlation between the two was r = -.232. This suggests that even if the total number of identified diagnostic items reflects a different aspect of severity, there should be caution about its use unless validated by further study.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Correlates of problem drinking among young Japanese women: personality and early experiences.

Problem drinking patterns were measured by the CAGE questionnaire among 90 currently drinking young Japanese women who were recently recruited by a Japanese company. Problem drinking was examined in terms of personality (temperament and character as defined by Cloninger) and early life experiences (perceived parental behavior, parental abusive behavior, being bullied at school, and positive and negative life events experienced before the age of 16). Multiple regression analysis revealed that problem drinking could be predicted by a set of personality scores, early death of a close friend, and the interaction of the death of a close friend and low explorative excitability (novelty-seeking component 1). This suggests that problem drinking in young women is partly determined by both personality and negative life events during childhood.

Adult↗

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Parental loss in childhood and social support in adulthood among psychiatric patients. Group for Longitudinal Affective Disorders Study (GLADS).

Psychoanalytic theories hypothesize that early attachment experiences with parents shape the structure and function of adult interpersonal relationships. The present paper aims to examine if parental loss experiences in childhood is related to perceived social support in adulthood. We directly interviewed 1247 patients representative of 31 psychiatric clinics and hospitals all over Japan as to their parental loss experiences in childhood and also administered them Sarason et al.'s Social Support Questionnaire. It was found, to our surprise, that those who had lost the father or mother through death reported as many current support persons as those who had not and that those who had experienced separation from the mother (but not the father) reported greater satisfaction with social support than those who had not. Several hypotheses are advanced to explain these unexpected findings and it is concluded that we must at least entertain some doubt on the direct continuity hypothesis between disruptions of parent-child relationships and the individual's later capacity to enjoy social support.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The influence of donor age to graft volume increase rate in living donor liver transplantation.

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Adult↗