This study investigates anxiety and defense styles in eating disorders. Seventy eating disorder (ED) patients and fifty-one female matched control subjects completed State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and 88-items Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ). ED patients were more anxious in actual situations and more anxiety prone in general. They relied on maladaptive action and Image distorting d...

This study explored the predictive value of observer-rated and self-reported defensive functioning on the outcome of psychotherapy for the treatment of depression. Defense styles were measured according to the Developmental Profile (DP) and the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) in 81 moderately severely depressed patients. All patients were treated with Short-term Psychodynamic Supportive Psych...

Adult attachment style, defense mechanisms, and personal history of abuse was studied in a group of abusive parents. As a group, these parents made unusually high use of the defense of denial; this was especially true of those with a Fearful attachment style. However, the use of Identification was characteristic of those with a Preoccupied attachment style. Further, personal abuse history was r...

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to predict the psychological well-being of nurses based on personality traits and defense mechanisms. Methods: The research method was correlational and the statistical population consisted of all married female nurses in hospitals of the Qom city. The sample size estimated by Tabachnik and Fidel method 114 and with Overestimate attain to 120 people. T...

Whether or not the use of maladaptive defense style is a trait, as opposed to a state dependent phenomenon, in panic disorder (PD) is a topic still very much up for debate. The aim of the study was to verify whether PD patients, both before and after treatment, used different defense style than the control group. Sixty-one PD patients (recruited from an original sample of 90 patients) and 64 he...

psychodynamic clinicians have long stressed the role of defense mechanisms in diagnosis and treatment of their patients. however, until recently the defense mechanisms were not the focus of extensive empirical research due to methodological limitations. the inclusion of defensive functioning scale (dfs) in dsm-iv has renewed the interest in psychodynamic approaches to clinical diagnosis, partic...

OBJECTIVE Identification of the risk factors and psychological correlates of prolonged grief disorder is vital for health promotions in relatives of persons who died of cancer. The aim of this research was to investigate the role of defense mechanisms, character dimension of personality and demographic factors on complicated grief following a loss of a family member to cancer. METHOD A number...