Australian & New Zealand J. Sociology, 1974, 10 (2), 143-144.

HOW DESIRABLE IS DOGMATISM?



J. J. Ray
University of New South Wales


J. Martin
Macquarie University


This report is concerned with the relationship between scores on the Rokeach Dogmatism scale, the Martin (1964) Social Desirability scale and amount of university education. The underlying theory is that dogmatism is inimical to higher education and is socially undesirable. Rather than asking people the rather hypothetical question of whether they think dogmatism to be socially undesirable, the scale-based approach used here is to see if people's pattern of response to dogmatic statements is similar to their response to socially undesirable statements. It is a covert way of finding out if people really do treat dogmatism as socially undesirable.

The two scales were administered in class time to psychology students at Macquarie University. The results were divided up into those students who had one, two and three or more years of contact with a university. As was expected from previous work (Ray, 1970), it was found (see Table) that dogmatism decreased with amount of university education. The 't' between the extreme groups was 3.08 (df = 123) which was significant at the < .01 level. It was also found that social desirability responding increased slightly with years of education (`t' of 2.47; p < .05).

Since the Dogmatism scale used was one balanced against acquiescence (Ray, 1970), it was also possible to examine the role of acquiescence in the results obtained. This was done by computing a separate acquiescence score from the dogmatism scale. This was simply the number of `Agrees' regardless of the direction of item wording. It was shown that acquiescence did not change with education.

The most interesting result, however, was one that appeared to be contrary to previous findings (such as Stanley and Martin, 1964). It was found that at no stage was there any tendency for the students to equate dogmatism with socially undesirable statements (correlations of .08 to -.17). It should be noted, however, that the correlation found for the present third-year group was in fact numerically identical to that found for their first year group by Stanley and Martin. It just happens that what is significant for an n of 127 is not significant for an n of 51. Clearly, however, any relationship there might be is an extremely weak one.

A possible reason for the failure of dogmatism to be regarded as undesirable is that what we call dogmatism may in fact in some degree be desirable. The students might be right. When all is said and done all the dogmatist is enforcing on his world is order. Yet seeking order in the phenomena of nature is precisely the task that the scientist sets himself. He attempts to build `systems and theories'. Often there will come a point when we must cease to be open minded and come to a decision. If we always waited for all the evidence to be in, it is doubtful whether we could function in everyday life at all. We might, in other words, have to take care lest we on one hand condemn as dogmatic, what is in fact a highly adaptive need for simplification, and on the other tolerate as open-minded the merely vacuous.



Table 1 - Statistics drawn from the Ray Dogmatism scale and the Martin SD scale for students after differing periods of University attendance.

.............Scale....... Statistics.......1 year contact...2 years contact...3 years contact

Sample size.....................................(n = 74)...............(n = 52)...............(n = 51)

'D' scale.................. mean.................86.94..................86.07..................79.54
..................................SD...................14.41..................13.01..................10.71
................................alpha.................... .83..................... .79.................... .71

SD scale.................mean..................25.22..................27.41..................27.64
..................................SD.....................5.80....................4.93....................4.37
................................alpha.................... .77.................... .67...................... .68

Acquiescence..........mean..................19.21..................19.50..................19.21
(`D' scale).................SD.......................3.54....................3.44....................3.28

Correlation between:
'D' and SD............................................ .08.....................-.02....................-.17
SD (+) and SD (-)................................-.57.....................-.31.....................-.50
'D' (+) and 'D' (-)...................................-.34.....................-.37....................-.51
'D' with acquiescence
from 'D'................................................. .31.................... .44...................... .30


REFERENCES

Martin, J. (1964) Response styles and the measurement of conformity and deviation. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Australia.

Stanley, G. and Martin, J. (1964) 'How sincere is the dogmatist?' Psychological Review, 71; 331-334.

Ray, J.J. (1970) The development and validation of a balanced Dogmatism scale. Australian Journal of Psychology, 22, 253-260.



FINIS

(Article written for the academic journals in 1990 but not accepted for publication)


ACQUIESCENT RESPONSE TENDENCY: AN UPDATE AND SOME DATA ON THE INVALIDITY OF THE DOGMATISM SCALE

J.J. Ray

University of N.S.W., Australia



Abstract

There appears to be a strong consensus among those who research acquiescent response tendency to the effect that one-way-worded scales are undesirable. Many psychologists, however, continue to use such scales. This suggests that the occasional dissenters who have defended such scales are surprisingly influential and should be taken seriously. Some faults in the reasoning of such commentators are therefore outlined. Some further data showing how the presence of acquiescent bias can be detected are presented using a balanced form of the Rokeach Dogmatism scale. It is shown that only the presence of an acquiescent response tendency serves to explain the findings presented. The balanced Dogmatism scale is shown to work best with highly educated respondents. This suggests that the one-way-worded version of the Dogmatism scale also has serious problems.

INTRODUCTION

I am indebted to a massive bibliography supplied to me some time ago by Dr Lewis R. Goldberg of the Oregon Research Institute for the information that the earliest academic paper on acquiescent response tendency goes all the way back to the time of the first world war (Cogan, Conklin & Hollingworth, 1915). I have been unable to check the reference personally as the library facilities available to me are less than encyclopedic but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of such a distinguished scholar as Dr Goldberg.

As the references that follow will show, acquiescence has continued to be a phenomenon of interest to researchers right up to the present day. All of the references given show concern with acquiescent tendency as a problem in attitude and personality measurement (Altemeyer, 1981; Bachman & O'Malley, 1984; Bass, 1955; Bentler, Jackson & Messick, 1971 & 1972; Berkowitz & Wolkon, 1964; Blau & Katerberg, 1982; Block, 1965; Byrne & Bounds, 1964; Campbell, Siegman & Rees, 1967; Cherry & Byrne, 1977; Cloud & Vaughan, 1970; Cogan, Conklin & Hollingworth, 1915; Couch & Keniston, 1960; Cronbach, 1946; Davison & Srichantra, 1988; Duhan & Keown, 1988; Eisenman & Townsend, 1970; Gage & Chatterjee, 1960; Gibbins, 1968; Goldsmith, 1986 & 1987; Goldsmith, White & Stith, 1987; Heaven, 1983; Hui & Triandis, 1985; Jackson, 1967; Krenz & Sax, 1987; Lambley & Gilbert, 1970; Lee & Warr, 1969; Lentz, 1938; Martin, 1964; Milbrath, 1962; Neel, Tzeng & Baysal, 1983; Oskamp, 1970; Peabody, 1966; Ray, 1970, 72, 74, 79a, b & c, 80a & b, 81, 82a & b, 83, 84a, b & c, 85a & b; Ray & Pratt, 1979; Roberts, Forthofer & Fabrega, 1976; Schmitt & Stults, 1985; Trott & Jackson, 1967; Vagt & Wendt, 1978; Van Heerden & Hoogstraten, 1979; Wilson & Patterson, 1968; Winkler, Kanouse & Ware, 1982). The references listed are only a small sub-set of those that might have been listed with the major omissions being less recent studies.

With such a strong consensus that acquiescence is a problem requiring corrective measures (e.g. use of "balanced" scales containing equal proportions of "True" and "False" items) in attitude and personality measurement, one would think that there was little left to be said on the topic and that all social scientists would now use balanced scales. Surprisingly, however, this is not so. There have been isolated apologists for one-way-worded scales (e.g. Rokeach, 1967; Rorer, 1965; Samelson, 1972) and it appears that such writings have been seized on by many researchers as saving them from the need to use balanced scales. The reasoning seems to be something like: "Some say balanced scales are needed and some say they are not so both options are equally legitimate". While such thinking may be understandable at some level it is remarkably poor science. A variety of authors have shown that acquiescent response tendency can have important correlates of its own (e.g. Gage & Chatterjee, 1960; Milbrath, 1962; Eisenman & Townsend, 1970; Goldsmith, 1987; Goldsmith, White & Stith, 1987; Heaven, 1983; Blau & Katerberg, 1982) so the correlates of any one-way-worded scale will always be susceptible of at least two interpretations. Science, however, is precaution-oriented and failing to take measures that will preclude alternative interpretations of one's findings is quite simply careless and asks faith of the reader. Faith and science are hardly of a piece.

The major point that critics of balanced scales (e.g. Rorer, 1965) seem to seize on is that different measures of acquiescence often show little correlation between themselves (e.g. McGee, 1962). They then seem to reason: "Well if it does not generalize it cannot be a problem". There is some truth in that reasoning, of course. The trouble is that sometimes acquiescence scores do intercorrelate (e.g. Vagt & Wendt, 1978). So the same reasoning consistently applied must say that on such occasions acquiescent tendency could be a problem. But how can we know in advance which circumstance will prevail? How can we know whether we will have a problem or not? I will not be so foolhardy as to say that we will never be able to know but, certainly the seemingly obvious predictors that I have tried did not work (Ray, 1983). That being so, it would seem the path of prudence always to use balanced scales so that if acquiescence problems do arise they can be both detected and controlled for.

Another approach used by critics of balanced scales is to point out that double agreement with oppositely-worded items is not necessarily a sign of acquiescent bias (e.g. Rokeach, 1967). This is, of course, perfectly true but it is, for all that, to fail to see the wood for the trees. Surely such double agreement is a problem whatever its source. It shows that the scale author has got it wrong in one way or another and that items he intends to be of opposite import are not so seen by those he surveys. It is a clear indication that the scale lacks construct validity. Only by using balanced scales, however, can we detect such validity deficiencies.

Other commentaries on the arguments used by the critics of balanced scales have been widespread but perhaps Peabody (1966), Campbell, Siegman & Rees (1967), Jackson (1967), Bentler, Jackson & Messick (1971 & 1972), Bentler (1973) and Ray (1983 & 1985b) might be specifically mentioned.

At any event it seems clear that many psychologists remain unpersuaded of the importance of using only balanced scales so yet more efforts to demonstrate the usefulness and informativeness of such scales seem needed. The tenacity with which some researchers cling to their one-way-worded scales can, in fact, be remarkable. One recent author (Van Ijzendoorn, 1989) used a one-way-worded scale even though he knew of the arguments against such scales and even though he knew of an alternative measure of the same construct in balanced form!

As we have seen, one of the persistent defenders of one-way- worded scales was Rokeach (1967). This may be connected with the fact that his widely-used Dogmatism ('D') scale is one-way-worded. It seems appropriate, therefore, to see how badly (if at all) his Dogmatism scale is acquiescence-affected. This has now been possible for some time since the production of two different balanced revisions of the 'D' scale (Ray, 1970 & 1974). Such an examination will be attempted below.

METHOD

The results to be reported below were in fact obtained in 1972. Some results of the study concerned were reported fairly promptly (Ray, 1974; Ray & Martin, 1974) but a full write up of the findings was not carried to completion and became overlooked under the pressure of other work. As the results do not appear to be in any way time dependant, however, it still seems appropriate to report them here.

The Statistics
For a start, it is accepted that double-agreements with original and reversed items cannot be seen as proof that acquiescent bias is present (Rokeach, 1967). Other methods will be needed if such a demonstration is to be accomplished. For similar reasons, nor is it sufficient to show that agreement is by far the commonest response to the items. The presence of such a phenomenon may simply show that both sides of the argument are persuasively put. The degree of agreement could, in other words, be quite meaningful and not at all vacant.

I have long used two statistics to demonstrate the presence of meaningless acquiescence: coefficient alpha and r(P-N). Acquiescent tendency should inflate alpha and deflate r(P-N). As Davison & Srichantra (1988) have recently reported findings that generally support my approach I will confine myself here to pointing out that the reasoning behind both indices is fairly simple. Anything that causes items to be responded to similarly will cause the items to correlate positively. Those who score highly on one item will also tend to score highly on other items. Acquiescent bias will therefore tend to increase the correlation between one-way-worded items. Coefficient alpha, however, can be represented as average inter-item correlation weighted by test length (Cronbach, 1951; Lord & Novick, 1968) so it should rise as acquiescent bias affects the one-way-worded scale (test length or number of items being constant).

The second index is useful as representing the outcome of two opposing pressures. The statistic r(P-N) represents the correlation between the two subscales made up respectively of the positively-worded and negatively-worded items. The opposition in meaning between these two groups of items should cause the items to be responded to oppositely and thus bring about an r(P-N) that is high and negative.

Insofar as meaning-independent acquiescence is present, however, it will cause all items to be responded to similarly and this could lead to an r(P-N) that is high and positive. If both things are true (i.e. the items are of opposed meaning and meaningless acquiescence is present) the two tendencies should cancel one-another out and leave an r(P-N) that approximates zero. The latter circumstance quite commonly prevailed with early attempts to balance the F scale (Christie, Havel & Seidenberg, 1956).

Subjects and materials

The Ss for the study were students in the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia who completed a questionnaire containing the Ray (1970) Balanced Dogmatism (BD) scale in class time. There were 74 First-year students, 52 second-year students and 51 third-year students, to a total of 177.

RESULTS

The results of interest here are given in Table 1.

TABLE 1

Statistics from the Ray (1970) BD scale when applied to three groups of
students.

Statistic....... Year 1 ...... Year 2 ..... Year 3

Alpha............ 00.83 ........ 00.80 ....... 00.72
r(P-N)............ -0.34 ......... -0.37 ....... -0.51
BD mean ...... 86.95 ........ 86.08 ....... 79.55
BD S.D.......... 14.42 ........ 13.02 ....... 10.71
n................... 74.00 ........ 52.00 ....... 51.00


It will be noted that there was a trend (non-significant) for the coefficient alpha to decline as exposure to the University increased. At the same time r(P-N) tended to rise. Thus the more sophisticated subjects (third-year students) showed less organization of measured attitudes (as indexed by alpha) even though the intended opposition between the positively and negatively worded items was most evident in
their responses.

DISCUSSION

If the students with greater exposure to the University had in fact (as we might have expected) had attitudes which were more organized, thought-out and consistent one would surely expect that both indices (alpha and r(P-N)) would have risen (both being measures of internal consistency). Ray (1970) certainly found students to have more organized attitudes than the general public and Sniderman, Brody & Kuklinski (1984) found that education generally increased attitude organization. That did not seem to happen on the present occasion, however. Why? Acquiescent bias provides the answer.

It must be reiterated that alpha is expressible as the weighting of mean inter-item correlation against the number of items. Since the number of items (36) is constant for all groups in the present study, it follows that variations in alpha are wholly traceable to variations in mean inter-item correlations. The implication of reduced overall correlations combined with increased (or even stable) pos-neg correlations can only be therefore that the intercorrelations between the positive items only and the negative items only (those being the only other correlations) must have dropped. And this is precisely what reduced acquiescent set would have led us to expect! Why? Because the positive items alone or the negative items alone form one-way-worded scales. As mentioned above, the effect of acquiescent bias on such scales is to inflate the intercorrelation between their items. If such bias is reduced, however, the intercorrelations between such items will drop (i.e. the correlation due to common direction of wording will be removed) and the contribution of such correlations to the average intercorrelation also therefore will drop -- leading in turn to the effect observed: An alpha that is slow to rise and which may even fall.

Thus reduced acquiescent set due to the mentally organizing effect of increased education does provide a complete explanation for the effects observed on the present occasion where the effects of education alone would not do so.

Clearly, then, the Dogmatism items are acquiescence affected and need to be used in conjunction with reversed items in order to control for any effects this may have. The fact that increased higher education causes the Dogmatism items to be responded to more and more as they should be, does, of course, have a corollary: The Dogmatism items are less and less valid the less educated are the respondents to whom they are applied. If increased education reduces acquiescent bias, lesser education should lead to more of it. It would appear likely, then, that the Dogmatism scale in a balanced form is suitable for use only with students. This is also what emerged from Ray's (1979c) study of balanced Dogmatism scales applied to a general population sample so it is revealed that even the balanced Dogmatism scale is a very limited measure. How much less valid must be the one-way-worded form of the scale.


REFERENCES



{Articles below by J.J. Ray can generally be accessed simply by clicking on the name of the article. I am however also gradually putting online a lot of abstracts, extracts and summaries from older articles by other authors so if an article not highlighted below seems of particular interest, clicking here or here might just save you a trip to the library}


Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Bachman, J.G. & O'Malley, P.M. (1984) Yea-saying, Nay-saying and going to extremes: Black-white differences in response-styles Public Opinion Quarterly 48, 491-509

Bass, B.M. (1955) Authoritarianism or acquiescence? J.Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 51, 616-623.

Bentler, P.M. (1973) An analysis of responses to adjectives: A reply to Samelson Psychological Bulletin 80, 133-134.

Bentler, P.M., Jackson, D.N. & Messick, S. (1971) Identification of content and style: A two-dimensional interpretation of acquiescence. Psychological Bulletin 76, 186-204.

Bentler, P.M., Jackson, D.N. & Messick, S. (1972) A rose by any other name. Psychological Bulletin 77, 109-113.

Berkowitz, N.H. & Wolkon, G.H. (1964) A forced-choice form of the 'F' scale -- free of acquiescent response set.Sociometry 27, 54-65.

Blau, G. & Katerberg, R. (1982) Agreeing response set: Statistical nuisance or meaningful personality concept? Perceptual & Motor Skills 54, 851-857.

Block, J. (1965) The challenge of response sets N.Y.: Appleton Century.

Byrne, D. & Bounds, C. (1964) The reversal of F scale items. Psychological Reports 14, 216.

Campbell, D.T., Siegman, C.R. & Rees, M.B. (1967) Direction of wording effects in the relationship between scales. Psychological Bulletin 68, 293-303.

Cherry, F. & Byrne, D. (1977) Authoritarianism. In T. Blass (Ed.) Personality variables in social behavior Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum

Christie, R., Havel, J. & Seidenberg, B.(1956) Is the 'F' scale irreversible? J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 56, 141-158.

Cloud, J. & Vaughan, G.M. (1970) Using balanced scales to control acquiescence. Sociometry 33, 193-202.

Cogan, L.C., Conklin, A.M. & Hollingworth, H.L. (1915) An experimental study of self-analysis, estimates of associates, and the results of tests School & Society 2, 171-179.

Couch, A. & Keniston, K.(1960) Yeasayers and naysayers: Agreeing response set as a personality variable. J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 60, 151-174.

Cronbach, L.J. (1946) Studies of acquiescence as a factor in the true-false test J. Educational Psychology 33, 401-415.

Cronbach, L.J. (1951) Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika 16, 297-334.

Davison, M.L. & Srichantra, M. (1988) Acquiescence in components analysis and multidimensional scaling of self-rating items. Applied Psychological Measurement 12, 339-351.

Duhan, D.F. & Keown, C.F. (1988) Effect of biasing an attitude scale: Acquiescence, reactance or balancing? Psychological Reports 62, 567-574.

Eisenman, R. & Townsend, T.D. (1970) Studies in acquiescence: I. Social desirability; II. Self-esteem; III. Creativity; and IV. Prejudice J. Projective Techniques & Personality Assessment 34, 45-54

Gage, N.L. & Chatterjee, B.B. (1960) The psychological meaning of acquiescence set: Further evidence. J. Abnormal & Social Psychology 60, 280-283

Gibbins, K. (1968) Response sets and the semantic differential British J. Social & Clinical Psychology 7, 253-263

Goldsmith, R.E. (1986) Personality and uninformed response error J. Social Psychology 126, 37-45

Goldsmith, R.E. (1987) Two studies of yeasaying Psychological Reports 60, 239-244

Goldsmith, R.E. & Nugent, N. (1984) Innovativeness and cognitive complexity: A second look. Psychological Reports 55, 431-438.

Heaven, P.C.L. (1983) Authoritarianism or acquiescence? South African findings. J. Social Psychol. 119, 11-15.

Hui, C.H. & Triandis, H.C. (1985) The instability of response sets Public Opinion Quarterly 49, 253-260

Jackson, D.N. (1967) Acquiescence response styles: Problems of identification and control. In I.A. Berg (Ed.) Response set in personality measurement Chicago: Aldine.

Krenz, C. & Sax, G. (1987) Acquiescence as a function of test type and subject uncertainty Educational & Psychological Measurement 47, 575ff.

Lambley, P. & Gilbert, L.H. (1970) Forced choice and counterbalanced versions of the 'F' scale: Prediction of prejudiced attitudes. Psychological Reports 27, 547-550.

Lee, R.E. & Warr, P.B. (1969) The development and standardization of a balanced 'F' scale. J. General Psychol. 81, 109-129.

Lentz, T.F. (1938) Acquiescence as a factor in the measurement of personality Psychological Bulletin 35, 659.

Lord, F.M. & Novick, M.R.(1968) Statistical theories of mental test scores Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley.

Martin, J. (1964) Acquiescence -- measurement and theory. British J. Social & Clin. Psychol. 3, 216-225.

McGee, R.K. (1962) The relationship between response style and personality variables: I. The measurement of response acquiescence J. Abnormal & Social Psychology 64, 229-233.

Milbrath, L. (1962) Latent origins of Liberalism-Conservatism and party identification: A research note. J. Politics 24, 679-688.

Neel, R.G., Tzeng, O.C.S. & Baysal, C. (1983) Comparative studies of authoritarian-personality characteristics across culture, language and methods Internat. J. Intercult. Rel. 7, 393-400.

Oskamp, S.S. (1970) Internal inconsistency in the stereopathy- acquiescence scales. J.Social Psychol. 81, 73-77.

Peabody, D. (1966) Authoritarianism scales and response bias. Psychological Bulletin 65, 11-23.

Ray, J.J. (1970) The development and validation of a balanced Dogmatism scale. Australian Journal of Psychology, 22, 253-260.

Ray, J.J. (1972) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.

Ray, J.J. (1974) Balanced Dogmatism scales. Australian Journal of Psychology 26, 9-14.

Ray, J.J. (1979a) A short balanced F scale. Journal of Social Psychology, 109, 309-310.

Ray, J.J. (1979b) Is the acquiescent response style not so mythical after all? Some results from a successful balanced F scale.
Journal of Personality Assessment 43, 638-643.

Ray, J.J. (1979c) Is the Dogmatism scale irreversible? South African Journal of Psychology 9, 104-107.

Ray, J.J. (1980a) Acquiescence and the Wilson Conservatism scale. Personality & Individual Differences, 1, 303-305.

Ray, J.J. (1980b) Acquiescence and coefficient Alpha: A reply to Porritt. Australian Journal of Psychology 32, 144-150.

Ray, J.J. (1981) Sample homogeneity, response skewness and acquiescence: A reply to Feather. Australian Journal of Psychology 33, 41-46.

Ray, J.J. (1982a) Machiavellianism, forced-choice scales and the validity of the F scale: A rejoinder to Bloom. J. Clinical Psychology 38, 779-782.

Ray, J.J. (1982b) The construct validity of balanced Likert scales. Journal of Social Psychology 118, 141-142.

Ray, J.J. (1983) Reviving the problem of acquiescent response bias. Journal of Social Psychology 121, 81-96.

Ray, J.J. (1984a) Alienation, dogmatism and acquiescence. J. Clinical Psychology 40, 1007-1008.

Ray, J.J. (1984b) Reinventing the wheel: Winkler, Kanouse Ware on acquiescent response set. J. Applied Psychology 69, 353-355.

Ray, J.J. (1984c) A further comment on the Winkler, Kanouse Ware method of controlling for acquiescent response bias. J. Applied Psychology 69, 359.

Ray, J.J. (1985a) Acquiescence and response skewness in scale construction: A paradox. Personality & Individual Differences 6, 655-656.

Ray, J.J. (1985b) Acquiescent response bias as a recurrent psychometric disease: Conservatism in Japan, the U.S.A. and New Zealand. Psychologische Beitraege 27, 113-119.

Ray, J.J. & Martin, J. (1974) How desirable is dogmatism? Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 10(2), 143-145.

Ray, J.J. & Pratt, G.J. (1979) Is the influence of acquiescence on "catchphrase" type attitude scale items not so mythical after all? Australian Journal of Psychology 31, 73-78.

Roberts, R.E., Forthofer, R.N. & Fabrega, H. (1976) The Langner items and acquiescence. Social Science & Medicine 10(2), 69-75.

Rokeach, M. (1960) The open and closed mind N.Y.: Basic Books.

Rokeach, M. (1967) Authoritarian scales and response bias: Comment on Peabody's paper. Psychological Bulletin 67, 349-355.

Rorer, L.G. (1965) The great response-style myth. Psychological Bulletin 63, 129-156.

Samelson, F. (1972) Response style: A psychologists fallacy Psychological Bulletin 78, 13-16

Sniderman, P.M., Brody, R.A. & Kuklinski, J.H. (1984) Policy reasoning and political values: The problem of racial equality. Amer. J. Polit. Science 28, 75-94.

Trott, D.M. & Jackson, D.N. (1967) An experimental analysis of acquiescence. J. Experimental Research in Personality 2, 278-288

Vagt, G. & Wendt, W. (1978) Akquieszenz und die Validtaet von Fragebogenskalen. Psychologische Beitraege 20, 428-439.

Van Heerden, J. & Hoogstraten, J. (1979) Response tendency in a questionnaire without questions Applied Psychological Measurement 3, 117-121

Van Ijzendoorn, M.H. (1989) Moral judgment, authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. J. Social Psychology 129, 37-45.

Wilson, G.D. & Patterson, J.R. (1968) a new measure of conservatism. British J. Social & Clin. Psychology 7, 264-269.

Winkler, J.D., Kanouse, D.E. & Ware, J.E. (1982) Controlling for acquiescent response set in scale development. J. Applied Psychology 67, 555-561.



FINIS

British Journal of Medical Psychology (1980), 53, 181-186

DISSECTING THE A-B PERSONALITY TYPE


By J. J. Ray and R. Bozek

It is suggested that 'freneticism' might be an appropriate name for the type of personality said by Rosenman, Friedman and Jenkins to be at risk from coronary heart disease. In study 1 the measure of this personality type (the JAS) was given a uniform answer format and, as such, was found to give improved reliability. It was administered to a random postal sample of Australians. A short form of 24 items was also produced. In study 2 a similar sample received the 24-item form and scales to measure achievement motivation, dominance and extraversion. 'A' types were found to be very much achievement motivated and dominant. A factor analysis showed these two traits as the main components of the A-B concept with only a third factor of 'freneticism'. This factor was measured in a third study which showed that the factor could be used as a scale in its own right.

Jenkins, Rosenman, Friedman and their associates (Jenkins et al., 1967, 1971; Zyzanski & Jenkins, 1970) have put forward the hypothesis that one of the important aetiological factors in coronary heart disease is the personality of the patient. They designate as 'A type' the personality most at risk.

The most important question to be asked about this hypothesis, of course, is whether such a personality does in fact provide the degree of prediction that the above authors claim. A prior question, however, has to do with elucidation of the hypothesis itself. What exactly does the A-B personality type consist of? What is it that the Jenkins Activity Survey (the proposed measuring instrument for the at-risk personality) is measuring? It is this question that is the concern of the present paper.

The label 'A type' (and its converse, 'B type') is, of course, deliberately uninformative. The underlying concept, however, would appear to concentrate on what one might call 'hard-driving-ness' -- particularly in relation to time. Friedman & Rosenman (1974, p. 67) define it as: 'Type A Behaviour Pattern is an action-emotion complex that can be observed in any person who is aggressively involved in a chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time, and if required to do so, against the opposing efforts of other things or other persons.' Later (p. 70) the same authors say: 'Overwhelmingly, the most significant trait of the Type A man is his habitual sense of time urgency or 'hurry sickness'.' In general, then, if one had to find an ordinary English title for the A-B construct, one would perhaps choose 'freneticism' (from the adjective 'frenetic').

The one means so far used to measure this personality type is the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS) in one of its various forms. Originally the instrument was designed to measure one continuous trait with high scorers termed type A and low scorers termed type B. Subsequently, the above-median scorers and below-median scorers were dichotomized further into A1, A2, B1 and B2 types. Also, factor analyses of the instrument showed that it could be conceived as measuring three fairly separate subfactors in addition to A-B type. The subfactors are: speed and impatience; job involvement and hard-driving-ness. In form the instrument is a behaviour inventory of generally around 60 questions. On some occasions, however, as few as 19 of these questions are used to score A-B type.

The instrument does have several features unusual in a personality scale: its items are a mixed set of Likert-type and forced-choice questions; it is very long and yet tends to have only minimal reliability (around 0.6); its conceptual identity is left vague and its possible relationship to standard psychological traits is not explored. Even in scoring the inventory, its authors took many years to rediscover to their 'chagrin' (Jenkins et al., 1971, p. 199) what Likert had discovered in the 1930s -- that weighted responses and unit-scored responses differ little in predictive power and reliability.

The purpose of the present paper, therefore, is to report the results of a program of research designed to: (1) shorten the JAS and improve its reliability; and (2) identify its relationship with conventional psychological trait measures. With regard to (1) above it should be noted that Shaw & Wright (1967) give 0.9 as the minimum reliability for a test designed to select out individuals for particular treatment and 0.75 as the minimum standard for a test used solely for research purposes. Although apparently used for both purposes, the JAS falls far short of even the lower standard. In Shaw & Wright's terms, it would appear to be only an instrument 'with possibilities for further development'.

Study 1

The JAS was included in a battery mailed out to a random sample of the population of the Australian State of New South Wales. The sample was drawn from the Australian electoral rolls. Electoral enrolment in Australia is compulsory not only for citizens but also for Australian resident citizens of other British Commonwealth countries. The sampling frame, therefore, is unusually comprehensive.

The questionnaire used included a two-paragraph preamble describing the purpose of the survey as: 'Research into how people see themselves and how they see their relationships with others'.

Of the 500 questionnaires sent out, a total of 122 were returned. A notable feature of the resulting sample was that the distribution of the four main demographic characteristics (age, sex, occupation and education) was not significantly different from that observed in contemporaneous random doorstep samples obtained in the Sydney metropolitan area. The postal interview technique did not therefore introduce any unusual biases as far as can be ascertained.

The 54-item version of the JAS was the one used but before inclusion, all items were recast into a uniform Likert format. Other scales included for the purpose of exploring possible relationships with the JAS were the Dominance scale from the Jackson (1967) PRF, the Ray (1976) 'Directiveness' scale (a scale of authoritarianism in behaviour inventory format), a short social desirability scale (Greenwald & Satow; 1970) and Eysenck's (1958) short scales of neuroticism and extraversion.

The reliability of the JAS and other scales was assessed by Cronbach's (1951) coefficient 'alpha'. This statistic is, of course, the mean of all possible split-half reliabilities and can be used as an estimate of test-retest reliability. Nunnally (1967, p. 210 ff.) however regards it as a superior statistic to the more easily understood reliability measures. Readers interested in a fuller discussion of the coefficient's meaning and use should refer to Nunnally's text.

The reliability observed for the JAS was, then, 0.76. This considerable rise over the levels reported earlier does hence suggest that the recasting of the scale into uniform Likert format was well worth while.

The correlations observed with other scales were: dominance 0.54, authoritarianism 0.44, extraversion 0.19, social desirability -0.18, neuroticism 0.02. All but the last are significant at the 0.05 level.

The JAS was then subjected to the automatic item analysis and deletion procedures of program ITRA (Ray, 1972). This produced a reduced 24-item version with a reliability of 0.77. The mean inter-item correlations of the shorter and longer versions of the scale were respectively 0.12 and 0.05. The two versions correlated 0.86. The correlations of the shorter version with other variables were: Dominance 0.42, authoritarianism 0.30, extraversion 0.20, social desirability -0.04 and neuroticism -0.02. The first three correlations are significant at the 0.05 level.


The implication of the correlations is that the 'A' type is dominant, authoritarian and (slightly) extraverted. He is not chronically anxious. These relationships are attenuated slightly with the shorter form of the scale even though it is more reliable. This indicates that the shorter scale has better claims to being a measure of a new and independent construct. The reduced openness of the shorter scale to dissimulation (social desirability responding) also seemed particularly worth while.
Study 2

This study was designed to cross-validate the new 24-item form of the scale. Would the 24 items work as well a second time around without the context of all the other items? Normally this is found to be so when a short form is produced (Ray, 1979), but it cannot of course be assumed.

Another question concerning the A-B construct that had not previously been examined was its relation to achievement motivation. Friedman & Rosenman (1974, p. 68) regarded achievement motivation as an unrelated construct on the grounds that one can be achievement motivated in a quiet as well as a hard-driving way, but the question would not appear to have been tested empirically. Many of the JAS items certainly appeared to embody the sort of sentiments normally associated with achievement motivation.

For the above reasons, then, a second battery was made up including the short A-B scale, the achievement motivation and dominance scales from the Jackson (1967) PRF, the two factors (impulsiveness and sociability) of extraversion according to Eysenck & Eysenck (1963) and the Bortner (1969) short A-B rating scale.

The Bortner scale was included because Jenkins at the time (personal communication) was recommending its use by researchers in lieu of the JAS until the JAS could be properly published.

Extraversion was measured by two scales on this occasion because the relationship observed in the first study appeared rather low given the nature of the A-B concept. It was thought that a break-up of extraversion into its main components might be more revealing. For this reason, the 10 highest loading items on each of Eysenck's two factors were used as scales.

The questionnaire embodying the above items was again administered by mail in exactly the same way (random sample without replacements) as in study 1 above. The resulting sample of 119 again showed a distribution of demographic characteristics similar to that observed in doorstep studies.

The reliability (alpha) of the short A-B scale dropped to 0.61 - a level similar to or below that reported by the original authors for their form of the scale.

In spite of the reduced reliability, the correlation with the Jackson Dominance scale remained similar to that observed previously -- 0.42; other correlations observed were achievement motivation 0.66, sociability 0.23, impulsiveness 0.10 and the Bortner rating scale 0.33. The Bortner scale itself showed a reliability of only 0.53. This very low reliability may be one reason why the Bortner scale does not show the correlations it should. If its own items correlate poorly among one another, not much can be expected of its correlation with other variables. It seems a pity that this feature of the Bortner scale has not previously been noted.

To allow for correlations between the other scales used to predict A-B score, a two-step multiple regression analysis was then carried out. Using first all four predictors (achievement motivation, dominance, sociability and impulsiveness) a multiple R of 0.70 was obtained with beta weights respectively of 0.601, 0.177, 0.044 and 0.127. In the second step, the lowest correlation predictor (impulsiveness) was deleted to give a multiple R of 0.69 with beta weights of 0.584, 0-185 and 0-063. The program used was MULTR from Cooley & Lohnes (1962). It will then be seen that the predictors explain just less than 50

per cent of the A-B variance. It must be realized, however, that much (though certainly not all) of the unexplained A-B scale variance will be 'error' variance and, as such, is by definition not predictable by any method. In the context of what is normally observed with psychological data, the R observed is, then, very high. Three predictors only explain most of what the A-B scale systematically measures.

As a further method of getting at what A-B items measure, it was felt that some analysis of latent structure was called for. The method chosen for this was McQuitty's (1961) 'Elementary factor analysis'. In spite of its name, this method is in fact a form of cluster analysis. Several writers have reported it as giving a more interpretable set of factors than orthodox factor analysis does (see the references summarized in Ray, 1973, and also Rump, 1974).

Two cluster analyses were, then, carried out -- an analysis of the scale scores and an analysis of the individual items scores. On the first analysis, all the scale scores (including A-B) were found to come out on the one first-order cluster. In the second analysis, there were three second-order clusters. The first two were clearly achievement motivation and dominance respectively. Both loaded almost all of the respective Jackson scale items as well as A-B items. The third cluster was more interesting. It was also rather clearly a true 'freneticism' cluster -- with most of its items coming from the A-B scale or the Eysenck 'impulsiveness' scale. It comprised 17 items - all worded in the 'A' direction.

The fact that the 'freneticism' cluster came third, however, indicates that it was extracted only after all the really strong relationships (correlation coefficients) in the matrix had been used. It not only contained fewest items but they were more poorly correlated among one another. This cluster does, then, have least importance in summarizing what the A-B scale measures.

Study 3

In this study an attempt was made to explore the further usability of the newly discovered 'freneticisrn' cluster. An attempt was made to explore its usability as a new scale in its own right. Although only the third and weakest element of the JAS, it did seem to be the one that came closest to what the original authors aspired to measure.

A third postal survey similar to the previous two was then carried out. As well as the 17 freneticism items it included scales to measure dominance (the Ray, 1976, 'Directiveness' scale) and 'psychoticism' (Eysenck & Eysenck's, 1976, P scale). The former was included to preserve some point of contact with the previous studies and the latter was included because of the similarity of many of its items to how the A-B type had originally been conceived. The following items, for instance might be noted: 'Do you like to arrive at appointments in plenty of time?'; 'Do people who drive carefully annoy you?'; 'When you catch a train, do you often arrive at the last minute?'; 'Do you stop to think things over before doing anything?' All these items come, not, as might be imagined, from the freneticism or A-B scales but from the Eysenck P scale. The P scale does however contain many other items not so obviously related to the personality type or types being considered here. The implication, however, would be that these other items may correlate with the 'coronary' personality. In Eysenck's terms, then, we are exploring the possibility that the frenetic man may be 'psychotic'. The caveat must however be entered that Eysenck's use of the term 'psychotic' seems to differ somewhat from normal clinical parlance.

Again 500 questionnaires were sent out randomly. This time, however, 140 were returned. Again the demographic structure of the resulting sample was indistinguishable from that observed in contemporaneous doorstep samples.

Item analyses indicated that seven of the 17 freneticism items were not correlating significantly with the total score on the scale. They were therefore discarded to leave a 10-item scale with a coefficient 'alpha' (Cronbach. 1951) reliability of 0.71. A list of these items is given in the Appendix. A reliability of 0.71 is not sufficient for use in selecting out individuals for treatment but it does provide a preliminary research instrument. It may be noted that although it is much shorter than the JAS, it is apparently more reliable.

The new freneticism scale, then, correlated 0.230 with psychoticism and 0.112 with directiveness. Its mean was 27.35 (SD 5.73). It was thus shown to be independent of the dominance component that had so permeated the JAS but was somewhat similar to what the Eysenck P scale measured. With the given n, the critical level of the correlation coefficient for significance at the 0.05 level was 0.165.

Study 4*

In this study , it was desired to examine how the 10-item freneticism scale might function in routine clinical use. For this purpose, it was included in a questionnaire administered to several weeks' intake of patients at the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme. Based on the responses of 201 people, the reliability of the scale was found to be 0.65. This indicates that the third 'component' of the A-B scale is no more satisfactory than the A-B scale itself as far as reliability is concerned.

Discussion

It has been shown that Friedman & Rosenman (1974) erred badly in believing their
construct to be unrelated to ambition. The correlation between A-B and achievement motivation is in fact among the higher ones to be found in the psychological literature.

In fact, one must ask whether the A-B scale is measuring anything other than achievement motivation and dominance. Certainly we cannot tell just what component of the A-B scale is providing the prediction of cardiac risk. Perhaps it is the achievement motivation component alone. If this is so, the whole effort of producing a new scale was rather uneconomical.

Aside from its conceptual impurity, there are, of course, also good psychometric reasons why the A-B scale should not continue to be used for predictive tasks. Even in its 54-item Likert form, the JAS shows a quite poor degree of internal consistency. Although a reliability of above 0.7 is an improvement on a reliability of above 0.6, it still corresponds to an average correlation between all the items of 0.05. This again suggests strongly that the A-B scale is not, as its authors claim, measuring a single trait or construct. Nor does the 24-item version of the scale when administered independently of the original much improve on this. The mean r in that case was only 0.06. Even the Bortner scale was only a slight improvement over this -- a mean r of 0.08.

Future research directed towards cardiac risk prediction, then, can surely no longer use the single confounded measure provided by the JAS. Instead, at least two scales should be used to measure its two main components separately. For both these components -- achievement motivation and dominance -- there are already good scales available from the Jackson (1967) PRF.

Whether the third freneticism component is worth further examination must be a matter for individual judgement. It does seem that low reliability is an ineluctable aspect of anything uniquely associated with the A-B scale.

*The authors would like to thank Dr L. Simons, Senior Lecturer in Medicine, University of New South Wales, and director of the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme, who made this study possible. Further details of the programme can be found in Simons & Jones (1978).


References



{Articles below by J.J. Ray can generally be accessed simply by clicking on the name of the article. I am however also gradually putting online a lot of abstracts, extracts and summaries from older articles by other authors so if an article not highlighted below seems of particular interest, clicking here or here might just save you a trip to the library}



BORTNER, R. W. (1969). A short rating scale as a potential measure of pattern A behaviour. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 22, 87-91.

COOLEY, W. W. & LOHNES, P. R. (1962). Multivariate Procedures for the Behavioural Sciences. New York: Wiley.

CRONBACH, L. J. (1951). Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika, 16, 297-334.

EYSENCK, H. J. (1958). A short questionnaire for the measurement of two dimensions of personality. Journal of Applied Psychology, 42, 14-17.

EYSENCK, H. J. & EYSENCK, S. B. G. (1963). On the dual nature of extraversion. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2, 46-55.

EYSENCK, H. J. & EYSENCK, S. B. G. (1976). Psychoticism as a Dimension of Personality. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

FRIEDMAN, M. & ROSENMAN, R. H. (1974). Type A Behaviour and your Heart. New York: Knopf.

GREENWALD, H. J. & SATOW, Y. (1970). A short social desirability scale. Psychological Reports, 27, 131-135.

JACKSON, D. N. (1967). Personality Research Form Manual. New York: Research Psychologists Press.

JENKINS, C. D., ROSENMAN, R. H. & FRIEDMAN, M. (1967). Development of an objective psychological test for the determination of the coronary-prone behaviour pattern in employed men. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 20, 371-379.

JENKINS, C. D., ZYZANSKI, S. J. & ROSENMAN, R. H. (1971). Progress towards validation of a computer-scored test for the type A coronary-prone
behaviour pattern. Psychosomatic Medicine, 33, 193-202.

MCQUITTY, L. C. (1961). Elementary factor analysis. Psychological Reports, 9, 71-78.

NUNNALLY, J. C. (1967). Psychometric Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.

RAY, J.J. (1972) A new reliability maximization procedure for Likert scales. Australian Psychologist 7, 40-46.

RAY, J.J. (1973) Factor analysis and attitude scales. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 9(3), 11-13.

RAY, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

RAY, J.J. (1979) A quick measure of achievement motivation -- validated in Australia and reliable in Britain and South Africa. Australian Psychologist 14, 337-344.

RUMP, E. E. (1974). Cluster analysis of personal questionnaires compared with principal components analysis. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 13, 283-292.

SHAW, M. E. & WRIGHT, J. M. (1967). Scales for the measurement of attitudes. New York: McGraw-Hill.

SIMONS, L. A. & JONES, A. S. (1978). Coronary risk factor screening and long-term follow-up. Year one of the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme. Medical Journal of Australia, 2, 455-458.

ZYZANSKI, S. J. & JENKINS, C. D. (1970). Basic dimensions within the coronary-prone behaviour pattern. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 22, 781-795.

Received 17 April 1979; revised version received 3 September 1979.

Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr J. J. Ray, School of Sociology, University of New South Wales PO Box 1, Kensington, NSW, Australia 2033.

R. Bozek is at the same address.

Appendix

The items of the new freneticism scale. All items are answered 'Yes' (scored 3), '?' (scored 2) or 'No' (scored 1).

(1) Do you often long for excitement?
(2) Would you rate yourself as an impulsive individual?
(3) Would you be unhappy if you were prevented from making numerous social contacts?
(4) Do you often act on the spur of the moment without stopping to think?
(5) Do you often have trouble finding time to get your hair cut or styled?
(6) Do you often find yourself facing things such as: Unexpected changes, frequent interruptions, inconveniences and 'things going wrong'?
(7) Do you like to have many social engagements?
(8) Would people who know you well agree that you tend to do most things in a hurry?
(9) Would you do almost anything for a dare?
(10) Are you given to acting on impulses of the moment which later land you in difficulty?


POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

Replication is one of the cornerstones of science. A new research result will normally require replication by later researchers before the truth and accuracy of the observation concerned is generally accepted. If a result is to be replicated, however, careful specification of the original research procedure is important.

In questionnaire research it has been my observation that the results are fairly robust as to questionnaire format. It is the content of the question that matters rather than how the question is presented. It is nonetheless obviously desirable for an attempted replication to follow the original procedure as closely as possible so I have given here samples of how I presented my questionnaires in most of the research I did.


FINIS

British Journal of Medical Psychology, (1982), 55, 215-218.

IS AUTHORITARIANISM THE MAIN ELEMENT OF THE CORONARY-PRONE PERSONALITY?




By J. J. Ray and L. A. Simons

Clients at the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme were screened for actual CHD and sufferers were compared with non-sufferers an four personality scales to measure respectively: A--B. dominance, achievement motivation and 'Freneticism'. There were 112 sufferers and 201 controls. Sufferers were found to have significantly higher scores an dominance -- the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale -- but also to have significantly lower scores on the A--B measure. This latter reversal of the usual relationship was an artifact of the fact that older people are both more CHD prone and get lower A-B scores. When age was controlled for there was no relationship between A-B type and CHD. This left the authoritarian style of dominance measured by the Directiveness scale as the sole predictor of CHD. This was held to be a belated vindication of claims made in the pioneering work of Dunbar (1943)

In their recent comprehensive review article, Matteson & Ivancevich (1980) report a strong preponderance of studies confirming that the A-B personality type is implicated in coronary heart disease. They also find several lacunae in the research to date. One of their concerns is that the nature and identity of the A-B construct have been insufficiently identified. In particular, how is it related to conventional psychological personality tests? Since their paper went to press a series of four studies addressed to just this question has been reported (Ray & Bozek, 1980). In this paper the Jenkins Activity Survey (one of the main measures of the A-B construct) was subjected to the sort of psychometric refinement usual in psychological test construction. The correlations of each item in the scale with the total score on the scale were calculated and only those items showing the highest correlation were retained -- thus leading to an improvement in scale reliability. It was also found that the items of this shortened scale clustered very clearly with items from two conventional psychological personality scales -- measuring respectively dominance and motivation to achievement. There was also a third unique component in the JAS tentatively labelled 'Freneticism' (from the adjective 'frenetic'). The question as to which of these three components might be providing the prediction of CHD (coronary heart disease) was left open. Are coronary-prone people dominant, ambitious, frenetic, or all three together? The present study was devised in the hope of throwing some light on this question.

One of the difficulties in ascertaining whether CHD victims are high on some attribute is to specify in relation to whom they may be considered high. In theory, of course, one wishes to compare them with the population norm, but this is a difficult parameter to derive. We cannot examine the whole population so we must use a sample of it. Yet most conventional sample types contain serious biases. Other hospital patients have some type of illness. People who respond to public calls to come forward, people who return mail questionnaires and people who cooperate with doorstep interviewers, are all minorities who might be quite unrepresentative of their less cooperative brethren. Particularly when it comes to questions measuring things like freneticism, dominance and ambition, volunteers must almost be expected to differ from non-volunteers.

In these difficult circumstances, the most common strategy adopted in past published research in this area has been to take same large available group that is hopefully not too unlike the general population and dissect it into those who have had CHD and those who have not. The non-victims can then act as a control group with which to compare the victims. It is then this pattern into which the present research falls. We examine not whether the CHD victims are high on some variable in relation to the general population but, rather whether they are high on the variable in relation to their non-victim controls. Such a study need not of course be retrospective but, as Matteson & lvancevich (1950) point out, most such studies have in fact been retrospective.

METHOD

The present work took advantage of the fact that there exists in Sydney, Australia, a voluntary public programme of screening for CHD risk factors which annually attracts around 10000 Australians from all walks of life. Details of the programme are available elsewhere (Simons & Jones, 1978). A small minority of screenees already have CHD. There is thus avaiIable a useful experimental and control-group situation.

A questionnaire was prepared which contained four personality self-report scales: the Ray ( 1976, 1980) 14-item Directiveness scale -- one of the dominance scales used in previously reported research (Ray & Bozek. 1980), the Ray (1979a) AO scale -- a 14-item scale also as used previously; the 10-item 'Freneticism' scale, produced and reported on as the third JAS component in Ray & Bozek (1980), and an 18-item short form of the JAS itself. This short form was a further reduction of the 24-item short form reported in Ray & Bozek (1980) based on the item analysis from the third study there reported. The further reduction was designed to increase reliability by deleting less central items. It may be noted that it is quite usual for only a small number of the full set of JAS items to be scored (Matteson & Ivancevich, 1980).

This questionnaire was administered to a standardization sample of the first two weeks' attenders at clinic and any actual CHD victims separated out. This gave a control group sample of 201 people. In subsequent weeks only CHD patients completed the questionnaire. Over a 12-month period a total of 112 questionnaires from actual CHD sufferers were accumulated.

Confirmation of the diagnosis of CHD (previous myocardial infarction or angina pectoris) was made by history and by assessment of the Rose & Blackburn (1968) Cardio-vascular Questionnaire.

RESULTS

Means and standard deviations for the two patient groups were calculated for each of the four scales. The means of only two scales differed significantly across the two groups. It was found that the CHD sufferers had significantly lower scores on the modified JAS (t = 2.29; p < .05) and significantly higher scores on the Directiveness scale (t = 3.05; p < 0.01). As in previous research it was also found that the JAS correlated significantly with scores on the Directiveness scale: 0.463 among the CHD cases and 0.358 among the controls.

The finding that the JAS correlates with CHD in the opposite direction to that usually reported seems at first odd but is in fact nothing more than an artifact of the correlation of the scale with age -- the one variable that does without dispute increase one's CHD risk. This is most clearly seen if the findings are re-expressed in terms of correlations -- with CHD incidence scored as a 'dummy' variable (0 for being in the control group; and 1 for being in the victim group). Among the 313 subjects we then find that the correlations with CHD are 0.173 for Directiveness, -.130 for the JAS and 0.488 for age. Age in turn correlates 0.013 with Directiveness and -.263 with the JAS. Age then is far and away the main variable predictive of CHD and, as one gets older, one gets lower scores on the JAS (i.e. one slows down). We must then control for age if we are to examine the true impact of the A-B variable alone. This is most easily done by means of partial correlation. When this is done we find that the correlation of the JAS with CHD drops to --0.002 -- totally non-significant. Directiveness score, on the other hand, is unaffected by age.

DISCUSSION

Although generically a dominance scale, the Directiveness scale was in fact written to measure the authoritarian style of dominance (Ray, 1976). It has in fact been used in a wide variety of studies of authoritarianism (e.g. Heaven, 1980; Ray, 1980). It differs from the California 'F' scale (Adorno et al., 1950) in that it is a good predictor of actual authoritarian behaviour (Ray. 1976). It is perhaps ironical that although Adorno et al in their pioneering work termed authoritarianism a disease, it was in fact a form of mental abnormality they had in mind. Just when this allegation has been fairly convincingly laid to rest (Masling, 1954: Roberts & Jessor, 1958; Elms, 1970: Richek et al., 1970: Crabbe. 1974; Ray. 1979b) it turns out that authoritarianism is in fact implicated in illness after all -- but illness of a physical kind.

It is not hard to surmise why authoritarianism might lead to heart disease. A life devoted to imposing one's own will on others must be one filled with all kinds of
stresses -- particularly emotional. Since the heart is automatically affected by many kinds of emotional stress, it is plausible to see it as just simply harder worked among authoritarians.

The failure of the JAS or any of its other 'components' to predict CHD is not of course new. In fact many researchers outside the Jenkins--Rosenman--Friedman-Zyzanski group report what Rime & Bonami (1979) politely call 'inconsistent' results in studies of the personality correlates of CHD. Where the American group reports CHD sufferers as very active, European studies in particular show some tendency to find precisely the opposite -- that CHD victims are particularly passive. Rime & Bonami have summarized some of the findings of this type and from their own work conclude that CHD victims are passive, dependent and ego-defensive. Siltanen et al. (1975) report similar findings for their group of 'mild' CHD sufferers.

The present findings do of course look as if they fit precisely in this 'European' mould if we look at the correlation between the JAS and CHD before controls for age are applied. This may suggest that the 'European' pattern of results is an artifact of failure to control for age also and that the real picture is simply one of no relationship.

In conclusion, then, it would appear that the JAS and the construct it measures (A-B) have been far too general and inclusive, and that where positive results have in the past been found it has been due to only one of the many components embedded in the larger measure -- and that component is authoritarianism. This does in fact constitute something of a belated vindication of the work of Dunbar (1943). In her pioneering work, Dunbar described the coronary personality as compulsive, dominating and aggressive. As Matteson & Ivancevich (1980) point out, this view has tended to lack current acceptance because of a variety of methodological problems in the original work. The present confirmation of Dunbar's theories from a quite different starting-point and a quite independent source must then be seen as giving them fresh claims to careful consideration. At the very least, the Directiveness scale would seem to have been given a strong claim for inclusion in future research into the personality precursors of CHD.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Robert Bozek for assistance with the earlier stages of this project.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality New York: Harper.

Crabbe, B.D. (1974) Are authoritarians sick? In J.J. Ray (Ed.) Conservatism as heresy. Sydney: ANZ Book Co.

Dunbar, F. (1943) Psychosomatic diagnosis. N.Y.: Hoeber Press.

Elms, A.C. (1970) Those little old ladies in tennis shoes are no nuttier than anyone else, it turns out. Psychology Today 3, 27-59.

Heaven, P.C.L. (1980) Authoritarianism, prejudice and alienation among Afrikaners. J. Social Psychology, 110, 39-42.

Masling, M. (1954) How neurotic is the authoritarian? J. Abnormal & Social Psychology 49, 316-318.

Matteson, M.T. & Ivancevich, J.M. (1980) The coronary-prone behavior pattern: A review and appraisal. Social Science & Medicine 14a, 337-351

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1979) A quick measure of achievement motivation -- validated in Australia and reliable in Britain and South Africa. Australian Psychologist 14, 337-344.

Ray, J.J. (1979) The authoritarian as measured by a personality scale Solid citizen or misfit? J. Clinical Psychology 35, 744-746.

Ray, J.J. (1980) Authoritarianism in California 30 years later -- with some cross-cultural comparisons. Journal of Social Psychology, 111, 9-17.

Ray, J.J. & Bozek, R.S. (1980) Dissecting the A-B personality type. British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 181-186.

Richek, H. J., Mayo, C.D. & Puryear, H. B. (1970) Dogmatism, religiosity and mental health in college students. Mental Hygeine, 54, 572-574.

Rime, B. & Bonami, M. (1979) Overt and covert personality traits associated with coronary heart disease. British J. Medical Psychology 52, 77-84

Roberts, A. H. & Jessor, R. (1958) Authoritarianism, punitiveness and perceived social status. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 56, 311- 314.

Rose, G. A. & Blackburn, H. (1968). Cardiovascular Survey Methods. Geneva: WHO Monograph Series. no. 56.

Siltanen, P., Lauroma, M., Nirrko, O., Punsar, S., Pyorala, K., Tuominen, H. & Vanhala, K. (1975) Psychological characteristics related to coronary heart disease. J. Psychosomatic Research 19, 183-195.

Simons, L. A. & Jones, A. S. (1978). Coronary risk factor screening and long-term follow-up. Year One of the Sydney Coronary Heart Disease Prevention Programme. Medical Journal of Australia, 2, 455-- 455.



FINIS

British Journal of Medical Psychology (1984), 57, 385.

CONFUSIONS IN DEFINING 'A-B' PERSONALITY

TYPE: A rejoinder to Jenkins & Zyzanski





John J. Ray

Ray & Bozek (1980) suggested that the Jenkins Activity Survey or 'JAS' (for measuring A-B personality) contained items measuring three different qualities: dominance, achievement motivation and 'freneticism'. Although freneticism was found to be only a minor component of the JAS, it seems to correspond most closely to what the JAS is said to be measuring.

Jenkins & Zyzanski's (1982) reply to that paper suggests, however, vacillation over whether there is any such thing as a single 'A-type' at all. Although patients are assigned a single score representing their degree of 'A-ness', Jenkins & Zyzanski (1982, p. 219) say: 'We conceive of the type A behaviour pattern as a configuration of psychological traits involving independent components' (italics added). This is confusing. Is there one trait (A-ness) that predicts CHD (coronary heart disease) or are there several independent traits? If there are several independent traits should they not be described and studied separately? If they are independent, what might be true of the one might not be true of all. Only if they were related traits would it make sense to group them together. Is there, in fact, a 'Type A' personality?

I originally thought that the items of the JAS were designed to measure aspects of a single personality type (or 'behaviour pattern') called 'A-B' and therefore Studies II, III and IV of Ray & Bozek (1980) used only items which could be shown to be central to what the inventory as a whole was measuring. This practice was continued in Ray & Simons (1982), where only the 18 most discriminating items of the JAS were used. Jenkins & Zyzanski (1982), however, suggest that this shortening makes my results non-comparable with theirs. However, in their own work they have used many different forms of their inventory and usually score only 21 items to get the A-B score (see the JAS manual). Their practice gives the impression that satisfactory results are obtained with a wide variety of forms of the inventory. They mention that I did not use their weighting system to score each item but they fail to mention their own earlier finding (see Ray & Bozek, 1980) that unweighted additions of item scores give results that are indistinguishable from those derived by weighting formulas.

Using unit weights, therefore, I reprocessed the data from Study I of Ray & Bozek (1980) to score both the 21 items prescribed by the Jenkins group for measuring 'A-B' and the 18 items used by Ray & Simons (1982) to score 'A-B'. After attenuation correction, the two forms of the scale correlated + 1.00. Operationally, therefore, the concepts of 'A-B' used by me and by the Jenkins group are identical.

References

Jenkins, C. D. & Zyzanski, S. J. (1982). The type A behaviour pattern is alive and well - when not dissected: A reply. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 55, 219.

Ray, J.J. & Bozek, R.S. (1980) Dissecting the A-B personality type. British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 181-186.

Ray, J.J. & Simons, L. (1982) Is authoritarianism the main element of the coronary-prone personality? British J. Medical Psychology
55, 215-218.


FINIS

Personality Study and Group Behaviour, 1986, 6 (2), 1-7.

ALTERNATIVES TO THE A-B PERSONALITY CONCEPT IN PREDICTING CORONARY HEART DISEASE




J. J. Ray

University of N. S. W., Australia

Abstract

"A-type" personality is said to lead to coronary heart disease (CHD) yet even the authors of the concept admit that "A type" comprises several independent components. Generally, these components seem to be well-known psychological constructs (such as achievement motivation and aggression) but a fairly new construct which might be called "Freneticism" is also included. Freneticism (as measured by factors "S" of the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS), does not however in fact seem to predict CHD. A reanalysis of the data from an Australian study by Ray & Simons was therefore carried out to see if something could be saved from the one genuine conceptual innovation falling under the "A-B" umbrella. After appropriate partial correlations were carried out to allow for correlations among the predictor variables, it was found that a new measure of freneticism independent of "A-B" (the Ray & Bozek scale) did provide a significant prediction of CHD. "A-B" score (derived from the JAS), however, was found to be a significant predictor of CHD only insofar as it measured an element of authoritarianism. There are thus two quite independent predictors of CHD -- authoritarianism and Freneticism. The A-B concept and the scale used to measure it (the JAS), however, have no useful role in either of them.

In 1979 Jenkins, Zyzanski & Rosenman (1979) published their manual for the ` "Jenkins Activity Survey" (or JAS) as the culmination of a research program that stretched back to at least 2O years earlier. The JAS was intended primarily as a measure of "A-B" -- a personality type (or, as they call it, a "behaviour pattern'') that has been claimed to be particularly common among sufferers from coronary heart disease (CHD). Since this commercial publication of the JAS in 1979, interest in the "A-B" concept appears to have become widespread among psychologists -- even among social psychologists (e, g. Mathews, 1982 and Strube, Turner, Patrick & Perillo, 1983). The interest of the concept now seems, in other words, to extend well beyond its original cardiological applications. Close attention to what the concept of "A-B" means and whether the JAS measures it is then well-warranted.

The term "A-B" seems to be used by its authors in two different ways (See Ray, 1984b). It can mean either whatever personality predisposes to CHD or a particular set of personality traits. In the first usage the theory "A-type personality leads to CHD" is no theory at all but merely a proposal for a definition. Usually, however, the term is used for a set of specifiable traits including achievement motivation, aggressiveness and hyperactivity. The theory "A-type personality leads to CHD" thus could be expanded to: "Aggressiveness, achievement motivation, hyperactivity (etc) lead to CHD''. Talk about "A-B" is thus in a sense superfluous. Should we not be examining whether individual traits within the set of A-B lead to CHD? Could It not be that measures that mix up achievement motivation, aggression and hyperactivity all in the one index might be providing a prediction of CHD solely because of one component in that index? Might it not be that aggression alone could account for the relationships observed ? A recent literature review (Diamond, 1981) suggests that it might.

If, then, aggression/hostility could alone account for much of the relationship between CHD and personality, where lies the usefulness of the "A-B" concept? Aggression and hostility are familiar concepts to psychologists and well-known measures of them have long been available. Why do we need either the concept of "A-B" or the inventory (the JAS) needed to measure it? One possible answer is that the definition of "A-B" includes one concept that is in fact relatively new to users of personality tests -- a concept that has to do with the way time is handled. Note the following descriptions of the "A-type" from Jenkins, Rosenman Et Zyzanski (1974) : "Time-urgency, acceleration of common activities, restlessness, feelings of struggle against the limitations of time". The Jenkins group do of course avoid providing a name for this component of "A-B" but for ease of reference we might perhaps call this component of the "A-type" personality "Freneticism". This then is one of the traits that is said to lead to CHD. This is obviously an hypothesis well worth examining. Unfortunately, it cannot be tested simply by using "A-8" scores from the JAS. "A-B" scores might predict CHD because of the other elements (such as aggression) that they contain. To test the freneticism hypothesis we need a separate freneticism measure. Such a measure is available. Jenkins, Zyzanski & Rosenman (1979) obtain from the JAS a factor-score labelled "S" (for "speed and Impatience") that should be adequate for the purpose. Unfortunately, in the studies they themselves list on p. 14 of their manual, factor "S" does not seem to predict CHD! The most original aspect of their theory appears therefore to be false.

Clearly, then, the days have passed when a single "A-B" score can be regarded as informative. What it measures is too multi-dimensional and some at least of the things it measures seem to be quite unrelated to CHD. Obviously, then, any relationship between "A-B" and other variables would be of uncertain implication. What is needed are studies which take the various proposed "components" of "A-B" separately and use different instruments to measure them. Two studies which did this were by Ray & Bozek (1980) and by Ray & Simons (1982). The first showed that what the JAS measured could be reduced to the familiar psychological constructs of dominance and achievement motivation plus a minor element of "Freneticism". The second study showed that of the three only aggressive dominance or "authoritarianism" (measured by the Ray (1976) "Directiveness" scale) predicted CHD. Thus most of what the Jenkins group have been measuring was found to be irrelevant to CHD. The finding with the "Directiveness" scale, it should be noted, does confirm Diamond's (1982) hypothesis that aggression is the central personality element in CHD prediction. As Heaven (1986) has shown, scales of dominance generally seem to measure a strong component of aggression as well as dominance per se.

A surprising and previously little-remarked feature of the Ray & Simons (1982) data, however, is that "A-B" was shown to be negligibly related to scores on the Ray & Bozek (1980) Freneticism scale. This suggests that either the JAS or the Ray & Bozek scale may be lacking in validity as measures of freneticism. Obviously, both cannot be measuring the same thing. See Ray (1984a). If we assume that it is the JAS that is providing a poor measure of "A-B", we are left with the interesting possibility that the theory put forward by the Jenkins group (concerning the involvement of freneticism in CHD) may simply not so far have been adequately tested. The consistent failures to confirm the theory may have been due to an inadequate measuring instrument. Clearly, alternative measures of freneticism should be tested tor their relationship with CHD.

The Jenkins group would no doubt wish to say again that the relationships with "A-B" reported in Ray & Simons (1982) and Ray (1984a) cannot be accepted because the selection of JAS items used by Ray & Simons (1982) to measure "A-B" is not exactly coterminous with any of the various selections of items that have been used by the Jenkins group from time to time. Ray (1984b) has however shown that the selection of items used in Ray & Simons (082) in fact correlates to the point of virtual identity with the selection currently favoured by Jenkins, Zyzanski & Rosenman (1979). This objection cannot therefore be used to deflect us from looking at the potential use of alternative measures of freneticism in CHD prediction.

METHOD

Following in the tradition of the many reanalyses of the "Framingham" and other data-bodies on CHD incidence, the simplest method of testing the possibility mentioned above seemed to be to carry out further analyses of the data described in Ray & Simons (1982) and Ray (1984a). These papers report a comparison of CHD sufferers and controls on a variety of personality tests and the Ray & Bozek (1980) Freneticism scale is one of those tests. The raw correlations between CHD incidence and personality variables reported in Ray (1984a) do not however tell us much by themselves because many of the predictor variables for CHD are themselves correlated. This must be allowed for in some way if fully informed conclusions are to be drawn.

The obvious confounding variable is age. Age is of course a strong independent predictor of CHD and also has effects on personality. It makes you slow down and thus get lower scores on measures of freneticism and "A-B". When therefore the influence of age is removed by partial correlation, the correlation of the JAS "A-B" score with CHD rises to .148. The correlation between CHD and the Ray & Bozek (1980) Freneticisrn scale also rises -- to .174. The Directiveness scale is not significantly correlated with age so there is no point in partial correlations for that variable. Since the level of the correlation required for significance (p <. 05) with the given N (313) is .113, it may be seen that the new analyses reported so far show in fact three scales which significantly predict CHD -- the JAS, the Ray & Bozek Freneticism scale and the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale. The claim by the Jenkins group that the JAS "A-B" score predicts "CHD" does therefore stand replicated and two new scales have been added to the predictor set. As the "A-B" score was however highly correlated with Directiveness and as the Directiveness scale is the better predictor of CHD (p < .05), it is appropriate to partial out Directiveness from the correlation between CHD and "A-B". When this is done; the correlation drops again to non-significance -- .076. Partialling out Directiveness from the correlation between CHD and Freneticism, however, leaves the correlation still significant -- at .147. Clearly, then it is the aggressive dominance component (the Directiveness component) of "A-B" which is providing the prediction of CHD. The Freneticism scale, however, is a separate predictor in its own right.

DISCUSSION

The new analyses of the Ray & Simons (1982) data have confirmed the disutility of using a single "A-B" score to predict CHD or, presumably, anything else. When separate scales are used to measure the main "components" of "A-B", it is found that there is not one personality type leading to CHD but rather two quite independent personality types -- freneticism and authoritarianism (the latter being here defined and measured as aggressive dominance). Nor can further use of the JAS be justified. The measures it provides (of "A-B" and "S") appear related to authoritarianism and freneticism but in neither case do they predict CHD as well. Even insofar as "A-B" does predict CHD, it is here shown that it does so only insofar as "A-B" contains an element of authoritarianism. "A-B" and the JAS fail, then, not only on grounds of conceptual clarity but also as empirical CHD predictors.

Paradoxically, rejection of the JAS as an adequate measure of coronary-prone personality leads to resurrection of one of the more dubious aspects of the Jenkins group theory -- the relationship between freneticism (their factor "S") and CHD. When a better measure of freneticism than the JAS can provide is used, support is found for the theory. Their theory is found to be better than their measuring instrument.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Ray & Simons data, however, is traceable to the way relationships in it were analysed. The use of correlation coefficients reveals that even the highly significant relationships were of very low absolute magnitude. There are personality correlates of CHD but personality as a whole is a factor of negligible importance in CHD prediction.

REFERENCES

Diamond, E. L. (1982) The role of anger and hostility in essential hypertension and coronary heart disease. Psychological Bulletin 92, 410-433.

Heaven, P. C. L. (1986) Directiveness and dominance. Journal of Social Psychology 126 (2), 271-272.

Jenkins, C. D., Rosenman, R. H. & Zyzanski, S. J. (1974) Prediction of clinical coronary heart disease by a test for the coronary-prone behavior pattern. New England Journal of Medicine 290 (23), 1271-1275.

Jenkins, C. D., Zyzanski, S. J. & Rosenman, R. H. (1979) Jenkins activity survey form C. N.Y.: Psychological Corporation.

Matthews, K.A. (1982) Psychological perspectives on the Type A behavior pattern. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 293-323

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1984a) Authoritarianism, A-B personality and coronary heart disease: A correction. British Journal of Medical Psychology 57, 386.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Confusions in defining A-B personality type: A rejoinder to Jenkins & Zyzanski. British Journal of Medical Psychology 57, 385

Ray, J.J. & Bozek, R.S. (1980) Dissecting the A-B personality type. British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 181-186.

Ray, J.J. & Simons, L. (1982) Is authoritarianism the main element of the coronary-prone personality? British J. Medical Psychology
55, 215-218.

Strube, M, J., Turner, C.W., Patrick, S. & Perillo, R. (1983) Type A and type B attentional responses to aesthetic stimuli: effects on mood and performance. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 45, 1369-1379.


FINIS

"A-B" MAY NOT PREDICT HEART DISEASE BUT MANY OTHER SCALES DO: IS IT TIME TO ABANDON "A-B"?






J.J. Ray

University of N.S.W., Australia

Abstract

Although the various measures of "A-B" have now been shown to be seriously problematical and as generally not predicting coronary heart disease (CHD) this matters little as there are a large number of scales measuring other constructs which do predict CHD. Future research should therefore abandon the failed "A-B" concept and investigate more fully the alternative measures.

JAS or SI or neither?

Yarnold & Bryant (1988) are just one example of many authors who have recently commented on the now widely acknowledged failure (See e.g. Appels, Mulder & Van Houtem, 1985; Emara, El-Islam, Abu Dagga & Moussa, 1986; Ray, 1986; Jenkins, Rosenman & Zyzanski, 1974; Katz & Toben, 1986; Lelouch & Kornitzer, 1982; Linden, 1987; Matthews, 1982; Myrtek & Greenlee, 1984; Nanjundappa, Friis & Taladrid, 1987; Rosenman, 1978; Ruberman, Weinblatt, Goldberg & Chandbury, 1984; Shekelle, Hulley, Neaton et al, 1985; Young, Barboriak, Hoffman & Anderson, 1984) of the Jenkins Activity Survey or "JAS" (Jenkins, Zyzanski & Rosenman, 1979) to predict coronary heart disease (CHD) but who still, for all that, seem unable to let go of the "A-B" concept that the JAS claims to measure. Eysenck (1990) has a slightly different approach. He still uses "A-B" terminology to denote coronary-prone and non-coronary-prone personalities but gives a description of what those personalities are that is more in accord with the evidence than is the description offered by the Jenkins group.

The JAS is not, of course the only measure of "A-B" in the sense intended by the Jenkins group. The other main measure of "A-B" is the structured interview (or "SI"). The SI appears in some studies to have some correlation with CHD incidence but, as Yarnold & Bryant rightly point out, has other problems: notably difficulty of training raters, subjectivity of scoring and poor score reliability in various senses of that term. Yarnold & Bryant are particularly persuasive in noting that the SI can reasonably be administered only once to each subject because subjects tend to "wise up" after the first administration. This means that the reliability of the measure in what is arguably the most important sense of that term is in principle unknowable. From a psychometrician's point of view, therefore, it would be hard to imagine a worse measure of anything. Additionally, in view of its weak relationship with the JAS, the small predictive success of the SI could even be due its measuring things outside the "A-B" concept. In the circumstances, Yarnold & Bryant urge us not to "throw out the baby with the bathwater" and urge us to continue using the JAS but with extra precautions. It is my submission that there is no baby in the bathwater but that there are lots of interesting babies elsewhere.

The other "babies"

The measures that Yarnold & Bryant suggest to enable continued use of the JAS (such as using only extreme scores) are very limiting and, as such, have something of an air of the counsel of despair. Their comment that we need to develop better alternative measures to the JAS is also somewhat strange. The crucial fact that Yarnold & Bryant and many others seem oblivious of is that there are already many self- report personality scales in the literature which do predict CHD. The JAS is in fact unusual in not predicting CHD. This can perhaps most clearly be seen in Krug & Sherman (1977) -- who show that in two large studies ten out of the 16 scales in the 16PF differentiated CHD sufferers from non-sufferers. There is, therefore, no reason at all to persevere with any form of the failed "A-B" concept. As reviews of the literature made plain as long ago as 1982 (e.g. Diamond, 1982) various measures of aggression or hostility in particular are good predictors of CHD. Being aggressive or hostile takes its toll on the body in various ways and CHD is one of those ways. It may therefore be useful here to mention at least a small sample of the more recent findings to this effect. A brief look at predictive scales outside the aggression/hostility area will also be attempted.

Scales of aggression and hostility

Katz & Toben (1986) found that the JAS did not predict CHD symptomatology but the Novacco (1975) Anger scale did.

Eysenck (1990) reported a large prospective study in which it was found that an apparently unpublished scale of anger and excitement predicted a variety of adverse cardiac events.

Ray (1984b & 1986) found that the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale (measuring aggressive dominance) was the strongest of several predictors of CHD and that partialling out Directiveness from the small correlation between the JAS and CHD reduced that correlation to non-significance. Ray (1984b) used a simplified scoring system to get A-B score but Ray (1984a) showed that this scoring system and the standard scoring system give results that are essentially identical.

Smith, Follick & Korr, 1984) found that the frequency of anginal pains was predicted only by trait anger.

Rime & Bonami (1979) used mainly scales constructed by themselves for the occasion and reported five different personality predictors of CHD including their own scales measuring self-assertiveness and ego-defensiveness.

Van Dijl (1982) lists a 9-item scale of aggressiveness/ hostility which was found on several occasions to predict CHD.

Scales of other constructs: Eysenck's variables

Eysenck's two major personality variables (neuroticism and introversion. See e.g. Eysenck & Eysenck, 1969) have been implicated with CHD in a number of studies. Lelouch & Kornitzer (1982) found anomalous results with the Bortner (1969) scale of A-B but also found that the Eysenck N scale was the best predictor of CHD. More anxious persons suffered more CHD.

Drummond (1982) found that introversion predicted CHD symptomatology.

Siltanen, Lauroma, Nirrko, Punsar, Pyorala, Tuominen & Vanhala (1975) reported a study done in Finland wherein the scales used were especially constructed in Finnish. Their two best predictors of CHD, however, were "inhibition" followed by Neuroticism. If we identify "inhibition" with "introversion", we again have an indication of the relevance of Eysenck's variables.

Eysenck himself (Eysenck, 1990) has also discussed the relationship between adverse cardiac events and extraversion/neuroticism.

Freneticism

Although most of the content of the JAS can be traced to familiar personality variables such as dominance and achievement motivation (Ray & Bozek, 1980; Hansson, Hogan, Johnson & Schroeder, 1983), there is a small residue of reasonably unique items which load on what Jenkins, Zyzanski & Rosenman (1979) call the "Speed and Impatience" or SI factor. It is, in fact, this aspect of "A-B" that seems to be most stressed in discussions of what constitutes "A-B". Regrettably, even the JAS test manual (Jenkins et al, 1979) shows that this factor does not predict CHD. There is, however, another measure of SI which was in fact partly derived from the JAS. This scale (the Ray & Bozek, 1980, Freneticism scale) does predict CHD (Ray, 1986) when appropriate controls are applied. This tends to suggest that the Jenkins and Rosenman group had better clinical insights than scale -constructing skills. Their theory was partly right even if their measuring instruments were inadequate.

Conclusion

It is hoped that sufficient has been said to indicate that there are far more promising lines of enquiry to follow in investigating the personality correlates of CHD than anything offered by the various measures of A-B. Other readings that would give extra context to what has been said here are: Linden (1987); Dembroski, MacDougal, Herd & Shields (1979); Haynes & Matthews (1988); Wright (1985) and Booth- Kewley & Friedman (1987).


REFERENCES

Appels, A., Mulder, P. & Van Houtem, J. (1985) De validteit van de Jenkins Activity Survey, een vragenlijst ter meting van het type A gedrag. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie en haar Grensgebieden 40, 474-487.

Booth-Kewley, S. & Friedman, H.S. (1987) Psychological predictors of heart disease: A quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin 101, 343-362.

Dembroski, T.M., MacDougall, J.M., Herd, J.A. & Shields, J.L (1979) Effect of level of challenge on pressor and heart rate responses in Type A and B subjects. J. Applied Social Psychology 9, 209- 228.

Diamond, E.L. (1982) The role of anger and hostility in essential hypertension and coronary heart disease. Psychological Bulletin 92, 410-433.

Drummond, P.D. (1982) Personality traits in young males at risk for hypertension J. Psychosomatic Research 26, 585-589.

Emara, M.K., El-Islam, M.F, Abu Dagga, S.I. & Moussa, M.A. (1986) Type A behaviour in Arab patients with myocardial infarction. J. Psychosomatic Res. 30, 553-558.

Eysenck, H.J. & Eysenck, S.B.G. (1969) Personality structure and measurement. London: Routledge.

Hansson, R.O., Hogan, R., Johnson, J.A. & Schroeder, D. (1983) Disentangling Type A behavior: The roles of ambition, insensitivity and anxiety. J. Res. Personality 17, 186-197.

Haynes, S.G. & Matthews, K.A. (1988) Area review: Coronary prone behavior: Continuing evaluation of the concept. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 10, 47-59.

Jenkins, C.D., Rosenman, R.H. & Zyzanski, S.J. (1974) Prediction of clinical coronary heart disease by a test for the coronary prone behavior pattern. New England J. Medicine 290, 1271-1275

Jenkins, C.D., Zyzanski, S.J. & Rosenman, R.H. (1979) Jenkins Activity Survey manual N.Y.: Psychological Corp.

Katz, R.C. & Toben, T. (1986) The Novacco anger scale and Jenkins Activity Survey as predictors of cardiovascular reactivity. J. Psychopathology & Behavioral Assessment 8, 149-155

Krug, S.E. & Sherman, J.L. (1977) Psychological trait analysis in preventive medicine. Journal of IAPM Winter, 48-56.

Lelouch, M. & Kornitzer, M. (1982) Ischemic heart disease and psychological patterns. In: H. Denolin (Ed.) Psychological problems before and after myocardial infarction Basel: S. Karger

Linden, W. (1987) On the impending death of the type A construct: Or is there a phoenix rising from the ashes? Canadian J. Behavioural Science 19, 177-190.

Matthews, K.A. (1982) Psychological perspectives on the Type A behavior pattern. Psychological Bulletin 91, 293-323

Myrtek, M. & Greenlee, M.W. (1984) Psychophysiology of Type A behavior pattern: A critical analysis. J. Psychosomatic Res., 28, 455-466.

Nanjundappa, G., Friis, R. & Taladrid, B. (1987) Type A personality: Hispanic and Anglo diabetes and cardiovascular disease. International Migration Rev. 21, 643-655.

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1984a) Confusions in defining A-B personality type: A rejoinder to Jenkins & Zyzanski. British Journal of Medical Psychology 57, 385

Ray, J.J. (1984b) Authoritarianism, A-B personality and coronary heart disease: A correction. British Journal of Medical Psychology 57, 386.

Ray, J.J. (1986) Alternatives to the A-B personality concept in predicting coronary heart disease. Personality Study & Group Behaviour 6(2), 1-8.

Ray, J.J. & Bozek, R.S. (1980) Dissecting the A-B personality type. British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 181-186.

Rime, B. & Bonami, M. (1979) Overt and covert personality traits associated with coronary heart disease. British J. Medical Psychology 52, 77-84

Rosenman, R.H. (1978) The interview method of assessment of the coronary-prone behavior pattern. In T.M. Dembroski, S.M. Weiss, J.L. Shields, S.G. Haynes & M. Feinleib (Eds.) Coronary-prone behavior N.Y.: Springer.

Ruberman, W., Weinblatt, E., Goldberg, D.D. & Chandbury, B. (1984) Psychosocial influence on mortality after myocardial infarction. New England J. Medicine 311, 552-559.

Shekelle, R.B., Hulley, S.B., Neaton, J.D. et al (1985) The MRFIT behavior pattern study III: Type A behavior and incidence of coronary heart disease. American J. Epidemiology 122, 559-570.

Smith, T.W., Follick, M.J. & Korr, K.S. (1984) Anger, neuroticism, Type A behaviour and the experience of angina. British J. Medical Psychol. 57, 249-252.

Van Dijl, H. (1982) Myocardial infarction patients and heightened aggressiveness/hostility. J. Psychosomatic Res. 26, 203-208.

Wright, L. (1985) The Type A behavior pattern and coronary artery disease. American Psychologist 43, 1-12.

Yarnold, P.R. & Bryant, F.B. (1988) A note on measurement issues in Type A research: Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water J. Personality Assessment 52, 410-419.

Young, L.D., Barboriak, J.J., Hoffman, R.G. & Anderson, A.J. (1984) Coronary-prone behavior attitudes in moderate to severe coronary artery occlusion J. Behavioral Medicine 7, 205-215


FINIS