Emotions, personality and life stresses in asthma

Forty asthma clinic patients completed a battery of tests designed to measure personality, emotional states and current life stresses as well as subjective reactions to asthma symptomatology. In addition, physicians' severity ratings, based on the amount of steroid medication needed for symptom control, and Peak Expiratory Flow Rates (PEFR), assessing lung functioning, were obtained for each patient. Analysis of the data revealed significant correlations between measures of personality, self-esteem, life problems and severity of asthma when asthma severity was measured by patients' self-reports of symptoms, but not when measured by either physicians' ratings or PEFR scores. Although there are moderate correlations between objective and subjective measures of asthma severity, the subjective measures correlated to a greater degree with a larger number of psychological variables.