Questionnaire about psychology/disease correlation – II

Objective. To further evaluate the adequacy of the items in our questionnaire aimed at unraveling the possible correlations between psychological features and internal disorders. This paper is dedicated to the items exploring the individual’s interaction with other people. Method. The items are divided into several subdomains. For each subdomain, we have calculated the correlations between the items of the respective subdomain (inner associations) and with the items in other subdomains (outer associations) by means of chi square test or Fisher exact test as dictated by statistical reasons. We examined the answers from our first 10192 respondents. Results and conclusions. Many inter-item correlations are the consequence of higher or lesser degrees of synonymy. Those within a given subdomain confirm the adequate allocation of items. Those bridging different subdomains may point either to incorrect assignments, or to semantic inclusion relations. Other results are not explicable by semantic similarity, and probably reveal psychological subtleties, such as: most individuals have a sense of undeservedness when badly treated by other people; those easily hurt by insults and humiliations have a propensity to timidity and/or emotivity; the subjects who shun conflicts are more prone to persistent thoughts, brooding people are more sensitive and more prone to conflicts, injustice-indignant people frequently get into conflict although they declare to be bothered by dissent etc. But at the heart of all the PFs in the Interaction-with-other-people domain there seems to be the sense of being undervalued, which should probably be the key issue to be addressed by any therapeutic interventions for diseases psychoemotionally determined by disturbed interpersonal relationships. Abbreviations: PF = psychological feature; Chisq = chi-square; OdRa = odds ratio; OdRaCL = odds ratio confidence limits; ErrProb = probability of error