Scientific psychiatry uses questionnaires . Part of the research is aimed at “testing” hypothetical questionnaires, and at measuring the information they are able to give. Being a verbal tool, it is also subject to being validated limited to the ability to understand the language and lexicon at a level that is not always common. And, of course, the change of language is a factor that almost starts the proof of the validity of a questionnaire all over again.
The questionnaire essentially measures not the content of the questions, but the person’s reaction as a standardized response to those questions. To be clear, the question “You have a happy life
“Measures nothing other than the tendency to provide an answer by choosing, for example, between” true “and” false “to a question posed with those precise words, and tells us nothing about the happiness of that person’s life as it could be judged with other meters, or as the person himself could declare it in other contexts.
However, leaving aside questions relating to not very definable concepts, such as happiness, let’s take a question that concerns an objective fact, namely “How old is
“Will not, as a rule, measure the age of the person, but what the person answers to a question about his age. One might think that it is the same thing in substance, and in many cases it is, but in many others it is not, because the perception of oneself, of one’s emotional state, and even of objectified data, is affected by psychic variables.
Leaving aside the dementia or mental retardation, in which the person possibly “makes a mistake” or “does not know” to answer. Let’s forget how the answers change with the situation, for example a clinic or a court report. Let’s talk about how the answer changes with other mental variables .
If we ask a depressed person if he has ever had happy moments in life, or to rate his fate from 1 to 10 up to that day, the answers are affected by the depression. A depressed person will say, for example, that he cannot concentrate, or sleep, even if he actually does, with subjective fatigue (for concentration), or without the feeling of having rested (for sleep).
If we ask a man in a manic phase if she has good relationships with others or is irritable, she will reply that she has excellent relationships with everyone and that everyone loves her. All this often in conjunction with phases in which friends, relatives and family are practically “desperate” for the person’s uninhibited, aggressive, exaggerated and risky behaviors.
The moods reach up to the deliroids: the depressive one, in which it is claimed that they no longer carry out their bodily functions, that they no longer see any acquaintance, that they live in solitude, that they no longer have resources or goods; the maniacal one, in which one denies everything that is in contrast with critical or negative affirmations towards oneself, and vice versa one affirms in a dry and universal way favorable conditions and of merit with respect to oneself.
In these conditions people are not really delusional, that is, they know the reality of the facts, but in the comparison aimed at being judged and framed they tend, in a decisive and persevering way, to affirm untruthful or extremely distorted.
Take a set of symptoms, and ask a group of people to report if you have them, and how strong they are. Different profiles will be obtained, but some factors influence the response modality, among which the “affective temperament” (hyperthymic-dysthymic-cyclothymic).
If the evaluation is made on the same symptoms also by another person, the difference between what the person reports about himself and what the other evaluates on the same symptoms can be measured.
People with an exuberant, extroverted, self-confident character tend to describe themselves “better” than how others value them. Introverted, insecure, and melancholy people tend to describe themselves as “worse” than how others rate them. People with an unstable, variable, ambivalent mood tend to describe themselves as “both better and worse”, that is, they amplify the magnitude of both positive and negative aspects, and in short, they attribute many more symptoms, of any kind. This occurs in a context where these people are assessed for admission purposes in a career / work context.
(continues)
