Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1981

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Howard R Pollio

Committee Members

Charles C Congdon, Leonard Handler, Joel F Lubar

Abstract

Psychological and medical measures were taken on a group of adult cancer patients in order to examine the patterns of relationship within and between these traditionally separate domains, A total of 48 ambulatory adult cancer outpatients with varied diagnoses were administered a battery of psychological tests comprised of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), the Imaginal Processes Inventory (IPI), the Draw-a-Person Test (DAP), a Necker cube rotation task and the IMAGE CA. Medical history, hematology and blood chemistry variables were subsequently recorded for each examinee.

Each of the instruments was then factor analyzed. With regard to the psychological tests, comparison of factor structure was made with a group of 48 young, healthy college students to gain insight into the dimensionality of the instruments in a more traditional subject population. The results of these individual analyses led to the selection of variables for cross-domain analyses.

Resulting cross-domain factor analyses indicated several relationships among the sets of measures and suggested the need for further, more detailed, examination of each instrument. The outcome of these analyses indicated that anxiety measures of the DAP were closely related to several medical history variables, while many of the IMAGE CA dimensions correlated highly with a variety of hematology and blood chemistry variables. None of the IMAGE CA variables that dealt specifically with the imagery of cancer cells, however, correlated strongly with these measures.

An analysis of patient IMAGE CA protocols concerning the verbal descriptions of cancer cell imagery was therefore performed. This produced several metaphorically-oriented categories such as Color, Dangerousness, Strength and Activity. These categories were derived from verbal descriptions and metaphors produced by examinees.

This rescoring of the IMAGE CA cancer cell imagery proved significantly predictive of medical history and blood measures. One of the resultant relationships indicated that those patients in better disease status were more likely to describe the cancer cells as threatening and dangerous, suggesting that denial of the disease, or an unrealistic reduction in the perceived severity of its threat, may be characteristic of those who do not do well with the disease. The overall pattern of results was discussed in phenomenological terms and the idea of the cancer patient as either a survivor or victim of catastrophe was suggested.

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