Relationships between bodily characteristics and mental attitudes: Bodily examined and self assessed raitings of ill health

Abstract: The present thesis investigates the psychometric properties and clinical relevance of the Resource Oriented Body Examination and its capacity to provide a useful assessment tool in patients whose symptoms appear to contain associations between psychological and physical problems.Our aims were to find out if an early version of the Resource Oriented BodyExamination, ROBE I, could be reduced into a shorter version, labelled ROBE II. We also wanted to know if ROBE II would treat the variation of items in the different subscales in a way that provided for discrimination between groups of patients with psychosomatic, musculoskeletal and schizophrenic disorders compared to a group of non-patients. A total of 198 subjects were body examined with a ROBE I protocol. The sample data were entered into a separate factor analysis for each domain. Principal components with varimaxrotations were used, and the first two factors for each domain were extracted. The original 254 variables were reduced to 144, constituting an instrument for body examination, ROBE II, with 10 subscales. All subscales showed satisfactory internal consistency. Within all but one of the domains the subscales showed acceptable intercorrelation. All subscales disclosed information of body patterns relevant for tracing psychosomatic symptoms inaccordance with the Norwegian Psycho Motor Physiotherapy (NPMP). The subscales of ROBE II distinguished bodily characteristics of patients with psychosomatic, musculoskeletal and schizophrenic disorders. Another research question in this study was: how do patients with stress-related behaviorand somatoform disorders assess their symptoms and self-image compared to healthy individuals, and how are these assessments related to bodily resources, assessed with a physiotherapeutic body examination?The test group (n=31) consisted of consecutive patients referred to a treatment center specializing in psychosomatic problems. Significant differences (p?0.01) were found between the test and comparison groups (n=22) on all but two of the ten subscales of the Resource-Oriented Body Examination (ROBE II). This was also the case for all the subscales of The Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) (comparison groups n=52), and for all but three of the eight clusters of the Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB) (comparison groups n=52). For the patient group, the ROBE II subscale Increased respiratory control correlated significantly with the SCL-90 subscales that measures Angerhostility,Phobic anxiety, Paranoid ideation, with the Personality Severity Index (PSI) andwith the SASB clusters Daydreaming and self-neglect, Self-indictment and oppression with r’s between 0.38 and 0.50. Body examination with ROBE II might provide a useful assessment tool in patients whose stress-related problems appear to contain associations between psychological and physical problems.