MONITORING AND BLUNTING COPING STYLES - THE MILLER BEHAVIORAL STYLE SCALE AND ITS CORRELATES, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ALTERNATIVE QUESTIONNAIRE

The present article presents two studies concerning the measurement of monitoring (information seeking under threat) and blunting (informati on avoidance) coping styles. Study 1 (n = 69) showed that the widely u sed Miller Behavioural Style Scale suffers from a number of weaknesses such as insufficient internal consistency, susceptibility to correlat e with measures of anxiety and other psychopathology, poor quality of scenarios, and moderate face validity. In Study 2 (n = 42), an alterna tive instrument is presented: the Monitoring-Blunting Questionnaire (M BQ). The MBQ has high face validity, good reliability, and is unrelate d to trait anxiety. Furthermore, in a ''thought experiment'' some indi cations were found for the predictive validity of the MBQ.