1"nearly every day" allows a wide range of responses to each item. Thus, Ss are differentiated in terms of both the frequencies they select and the number of different symptoms reported. Another feature favoring differentiation between persons is the relatively broad range of item preference values. Healthy Ss typically indicate experiencing only those symptoms with high preference values, while people more prone to complain also rate more items with lower preference values. The net effect is a good spread between the scores of these different types of respondents.Extensive experience with the PSI has shown that the scores are particularly useful in aiding decisions when interpreted in conjunction with other information. For example, in an Adult Psychiatry Clinic it was found that those patients referred from the medical clinic who felt that their problems were "all physical" and who were seldom helped by psychotherapy tended to obtain high PSI scores (above the 9th decile for APC patients) and very low scores on "personality" instruments reflecting psychological distress. OASI disability claimants who denied psychological distress but scored high on the PSI were most frequently those with uncompensatable physical disabilities who characteristically received psychiatric diagnoses of psychophysiologic reaction.The PSI is well suited for rigorous actuarial studies of somatic complaining in conjunction with other variables as well as contributing standardized information about the "intensity" of individual S's somatic symptom claiming for diagnostic decisions. REFERENCES 1. BRODMAN, K., ERDMANN, A., JR., LORQE, I. and WOLFF, H. G. The Cornell Medical Index-Health Questionnaire: VI. The relation of patients' complaints to age, sex, race, and education. A multiphasic personality schedule (Minnesota): I. Construction of the schedule. J . Psychol., 1940, 10, 249-254. 6. LADEE, G. A. Hypochondriacal syndromes. New York: Elsevier Publishin Co., 1966. 7. WAHLER, H. J. A comparison of the Shipley-Hartford as a power teat wit% the WAIS verbal scale. J . consult. PsychoZ., 1962, ,MI 105.
Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) was administered to an experimental group 2 days prior to the beginning of a program of transcendental meditation. The control group of nonmeditators took the POI at the same time. Experimental and control subjects did not differ significantly on any of the POI scales on the first administration. Two months later following regular meditation sessions by the experimental subjects, the the POI was again administered to both groups. For 6 of the 12 POI variables there were differences between experimental and control subjects in the direction of predicted "self-actualization." The psychological import of these changes was discussed as were implications for further study.
To replicate a previous study of the influence of transcendental meditation on a measure of self-actualization, the same testing procedures were again employed in this study. Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) was administered 2 days prior to the beginning of a program of transcendental meditation and readministered 10 weeks later. The control group took the tests during the same period of time with no significant difference on any POI variables on the first administration. For 10 of the 12 variables significant differences between experimental and control subjects appeared in the direction of predicted "self-actualization." The present study replicated the results of the previous study on the influence of transcendental meditation on self-actualization.
In an early paper on protective technics Frank argued that a defining property of such a technic consists in this distinctive feature of the stimulus situation:[It is] designed or chosen because it will mean to the subject, not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be "objective"), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes upon it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization [2, p. 403],
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