Prediction of Symptoms and Illness Behaviour From Measures of Life Change and Verbalized Depressive Themes

Abstract

A new measure of depressiveness in speech content and the Schedule of Recent Experiences are used to predict illness reports and clinic use in two samples of subjects. The results suggest that the more life change the subjects reported, the more depressiveness they verbalized, and that both life change and depressiveness scores predict illness reports and health service users. Multivariate combinations of the measures of life change and depressiveness gave better predictions than either measure alone, and the measure of depressiveness for the most part gave somewhat better predictions than the life change measure. This suggests that it is important to quantify reactions to life events. In addition, it suggests that the two longstanding currents of interest in psychosomatic medicine which concern the importance of life events on the one hand and of affective and intrapsychic events on the other can profitably be integrated.