RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERSONALITY FACTORS AND COOPERATION IN DENTAL TREATMENT

¹ Veterans Administration Hospital, Montrose, N. Y.

The background, design, and procedure of a pilot study to determine the influence of personality factors, particularly oral components, upon the patient's cooperativeness in dental treatment and the value of psychologic appraisal of these factors in predicting the patient's probable cooperation are discussed. The findings of this preliminary study indicate: (1) personality factors definitely enter into the determination of a patient's cooperation in dental treatment; (2) a trend agreement was shown between orality and cooperation as hypothesized, since no cases showing contrary correlations were encountered (however, correlations were weak, indicating that cooperation is determined by other personality factors as well as orality); and (3) evaluation of these factors can be made by psychologic tests, but the correlation between predicted and actual behavior is not high enough to allow the use of these tests as a predictive method in individual cases. However, successful prediction of the extremes of a large sample can be expected.

In the development of the study, the following technical implements that might be useful in further research were devised: (1) a rating scale for dental cooperativeness that in this study gave a consistent method of appraisal of patient's response to treatment; (2) two special psychologic tests: the Dental Sentence Completion Test and Dental Thematic Apperception Test. It is noted that this scale for assaying dental cooperativeness was designed to screen reactions commonly found in the psychiatric patient. Its application to other groups would require modification, but the principles of its design and use are shown to be feasible by this study.

Although the study was made on psychotic patients, it is believed that the conclusions may prove to be applicable to nonpsychotic subjects, particularly in the neurotic individual characterized by anxiety or compulsive behavior, in children and adolescents, and in the old-age group. The results of this pilot study indicate that further research in this field would prove profitable both in the possible development of a rapid means of patient appraisal and in the exploration of personality factors that are so influential in the development of a satisfactory dental treatment relationship.