Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol 82, Issue 10 606-608, Copyright © 1989 by Royal Society of Medicine
ORIGINAL ARTICLES |
RJ Howard and RM Valori
Division of Medicine, Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham.
The wearing of tinted spectacles by patients is often said to be a marker of psychopathology but without supportive evidence. To investigate the validity of this observation the personalities of 20 medical hospital patients who wore tinted spectacles were compared, by means of a self-report inventory, with those of 20 controls who were age, sex, and diagnosis matched. There was a significant increase in the level of psychopathology in the tinted spectacle group, both in terms of an index of global psychological distress; the General Severity Index, and nine primary symptom dimensions measured by the inventory.