Close study of twelve superobese women revealed the following principal characteristics. None had a serious psychiatric illness, but most showed moderate personality disturbances with predominant passive-aggressive traits. Depressive features, though common, were not severe. Food typically had been used to allay feelings of emotional deprivation present since early childhood and historically associated with the unstable marriages of these patients' parents. The label "oral character" is not sufficient to provide even a capsule description; stubbornness, defiance, needs for autonomy and wariness of entangling relationships as well as conflicts over exhibitionism also were prominent. These characteristics contribute to the traditional reputation of the obese as "difficult" patients and deserve greater attention to help improve the effectiveness both of standard medical management and of psychotherapy.

Frequencies of stanine scores for 10 Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) were compared separately by sex for 394 psychiatric outpatients and 748 normals using chi-square tests. In both sexes, outpatients had significantly more high scores on Response Bias, Orderliness vs. Lack of Compulsion, and Social Conformity vs. Rebelliousness and more low scores on Activity vs. Lack of Energy, Emotional Stability vs. Neuroticism, and Extraversion vs. Introversion. Female outpatients also had more low scores on Trust vs. Defensiveness and male outpatients had more low scores on Masculinity vs. Femininity. Outpatients had more extreme scores over all CPS scales than normals. It is concluded that tests of normal personality traits have considerable potential utility for screening, diagnosis, and design of clinical interventions.Several tests of normal personality traits have been developed using factor analytic methods.

Scores on factor analytically derived traits of normal personality, as measured by the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS), were correlated with ratings of psychological disturbance and psychiatric diagnosis derived from case history data for 394 outpatients. Results strongly confirm findings from past statistical studies that extreme scores on these normal personality traits are associated with psychological disturbance, particularly low scores on Trust versus Defensiveness, Activity versus Lack of Energy, Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism, Extraversion versus Introversion, and high scores on Orderliness versus Lack of Compulsion. New statistical evidence was obtained in this study for the importance of certain extreme trait scores where only clinical evidence was available before. These results are seen as providing further support for the premise that objective tests of normal personality traits have an important role to play in psychiatric screening, diagnosis, and design of clinical interventions.Normal personality traits are receiving increased attention as variables bearing important relations to psychopathology. Trott and Morf (1972), for example, found important statistical overlap between measures of normal personality and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) measures. Klinger (1978) also found substantial overlap between different normal trait variables and the MMPI in both normal and abnormal subjects. Magaro and Smith (1981) have used combinations of normal personality traits to predict such common clinical types as hysteric, compulsive, manic, character disorder, and depressive. In a recently reported study by Comrey and Schiebel (1983), frequencies of stanine scores for 10 Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) were compared separately by sex for 394 psychiatric outpatients and 748 normals using chi-square tests. Substantial differences were noted between outpatients Ira Lesser, Director of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic, and Annette Brodsky, Director of Psychology, kindly made the records available for this study. The CPS testing was carried out under the supervision of Douglas Schiebel, who was a staff psychologist at this facility during the data-collection period.

Changes in the perceptual-cognitive and affective components of the body image were studied in ten women who had undergone jejuno-ileal bypass surgery. As weight loss occurs, the cognitive body schema adjusts readily to the patients' new reality, whereas the affective component remains essentially unchanged during the first year after surgery. Implications of findings are discussed.

The Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) were administered to 394 psychiatric outpatients. The 40 subscales that define the eight CPS factors were intercorrelated and factor analyzed to determine if the same structure of personality traits fits beth normal and psychologically disturbed individuals. The factor structure in this study was very close to that found previously in six other widely different kinds of populations. These results support a previously stated conclusion that tests of normal personality traits are appropriate for use in assessment with psychologically disturbed individuals.