PERSONALITY-FACTORS AND CERVICAL PREMALIGNANCY

The purpose of the study was to attempt a discrimination between stage s of cervical premalignancy in terms of the four Eysenckian dimensions . It consisted of a quasi-prospective design applied to the presumed c ontinuum of cervical premalignancy. The Ss were 88 women addressed by a physician or self-addressed for Pap smear examinations. Prior to the Pap smear they completed a demographic questionnaire and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire providing scares of extraversion (E), neurot icism (N), psychoticism (P) and lie (L). By the Pap smear results ther e were four groups of women: healthy, suffering from vaginal or cervic al inflammations, suffering from human papillomaviruses (HPV), and suf fering from dysplasias or cervical intraepithelial neoplasms (CIN). AN OVA and discriminant analyses showed that the Eysenckian dimensions di scriminated correctly with above chance significance between the group s, mainly between the healthy and inflammatory, on the one hand, and t he HPV and CIN, on the other hand (on the basis of N and E scores), an d less well between the healthy and inflammatory (on the basis of L sc ores), and least between the HPV and CIN (on the basis of P scores). A s expected, in the healthy and inflammatory groups as compared with th e HPV and CIN groups, N and P scores were higher whereas E and L score s were lower. The results indicate the correspondence between physiolo gical and psychological characteristics and suggest especially the alt ernating relation between neuroticism and physical pathology. Copyrigh t (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.