Excessive Self-Focused Attention and Defensiveness among Psychiatric Patients: A Vicious Cycle?

Abstract

The contribution of defensive coping to the phenomenon of excessive self-focused attention was studied in 20 depressed or anxious psychiatric outpatients comprising the negative affect group, 20 patients with psychotic disorders, and a control group of 21 patients of an orthopaedic clinic. Self-focused attention was assessed using the Self-reflectiveness and Internal State Awareness subfactors of the Private Self-consciousness Scale. In accordance with other research on self-focused attention, the negative affect group obtained higher scores on the Self-reflectiveness scale' than the control group (t₃₉ = 2.40, p <.03). To examine the relationship between self-focus and defensiveness, Weinberger, Schwartz, and Davidson's approach was employed, using median splits of short forms of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Marlowe-Crowne scale to differentiate among four groups of subjects. The highest self-reflectiveness was found for those participants who were high in both defensiveness and anxiety. This group scored higher than the nondefensive high anxious group (t₃₀ = −2.31, p <.03). The heightened self-focused attention might result from automatically instigated states of self-focused attention and paradoxical effects of defensive efforts to avoid self-focus.