International Journal of Psychology
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Summer 2007

This research examined the relationship between job satisfaction and mental health among employees of an oil refinery in Iran. It was hypothesized that global job satisfaction and its five components: satisfaction with work, co-workers, pay, promotion, and supervision have negative correlations with the nine mental disorders: somatization (SOM), obsessive-compulsive (O-C), interpersonal sensitivity (I-S), depression (DEP), anxiety (ANX), hostility (HOS), phobic anxiety (PHOB), Paranoid ideation (PAR), and psychoticism (PSY). The JDI and the SCL-90-R were used to measure overall job satisfaction and its five components, and the nine mental disorders, respectively. The sample consisted of 828 subjects selected by a multiphase random method; 665 were regular employees and 163 were managers at different levels. Results indicated that global job satisfaction and its five components have negative correlations with the nine mental disorders at P<0.01 level of significance. These correlation coefficients have a range from -0.10 to -0.36 for regular employees and from -0.12 to -0.35 for managers. Only 8 correlation coefficients out of 108 did not reach statistical significance at P<0.05 level. The multiple correlation coefficients of the five job satisfaction facets and the nine mental disorders have a range from 0.17 to 0.38 for regular employees and from 0.34 to 0.45 for managers. All these multiple correlation coefficients were significant at P<0.01.

The Spence Children''s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) is proposed to measure anxiety in 6-12 years old based on the APA (DSM-IV, 1994) classification system. The scale includes six correlated factors of separation anxiety, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive, panic with agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and fear of physical injury. The scale was validated using a confirmatory-exploratory factor analysis for the age range of 8-12 and 7-19. Further, it has been standardized in the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Germany, England, New Zealand, and Austria, demonstrating high reliability and validity. The present study examined its use with 417 male and female students aged 6-12 years old in Tehran, Iran. The confirmatory factor analysis of six uncorrelated factors supported the six hypothesized factors, with strong internal consistency of subscales and the total score and indicated a good fit index for six factors. The Chi-square value also explains the covariance of the data. An exploratory factor analysis was also performed using Varimax original and rotative indices which is consistent with the proposed factor structure. The Cronbach alpha calculated for the internal reliability of the scale and the internal consistency of the total score was high, which is consistent with the results reported by other investigators. The results of this study have shown that the SCAS has suitable psychometric property among the Iranian primary school children and it is probably a clinically valuable tool in the assessment of childhood anxiety.

Cognitive therapy (CT) employs both behavioral and cognitive methods to promote positive changes in depression. Questions remain, however, about the mechanisms of change associated with CT. Further, the recent development of Behavioral Activation (BA) as a distinct alternative model for treating depression leads to the possibility that these two different techniques cause different processes of change. To answer these questions, two groups of depressed patients, one which received behavior activation only and one which received the complete cognitive therapy protocol, were compared through the analysis of change of different symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Session by session BDI scores of two groups from the data collected for Jacobson et al''s (1996) study, were used as the data set for the current study. The results revealed that although both treatments achieved equal overall outcomes, symptoms of depression had different response patterns. Curve estimation and effect size calculations also showed that although the magnitude of symptom change was comparable for many of the items on the BDI, there were several items where either CT or BA had stronger effects. The implications of these results are discussed with respect to the utility of measuring symptom change in outcome studies for depression. It is suggested that these results imply different mechanisms of change in BA and CT, and the possibility that clinicians might target more on less responsive symptoms in either BA or CT, to maximize treatment outcome. Methodological limitations of the study are presented, and avenues for further research into symptom change in the treatment of depression are presented.

As a part of a series of studies conducted for a PhD thesis at the university of Tasmania, this experiment investigated the emotional processes in the low-conflict and high-conflict mother-adolescent daughter dyads using reversal theory constructs (Apter, 1982) including metamotivational states, and reversal processes. Among 63 mother-daughter dyads participating in a previous experiment (Ghafar-Tabrizi, 2003), a high-conflict group (12 dyads) and a low-conflict group (12 dyads), were established on the basis of the Conflict subscale of Family Environment Scale (Moos & Moos, 1994). The study examined emotional changes during neutral, conflictual, and pleasant conversational interactions. The high-conflict group experienced greater levels of unpleasant emotions and positive transactional emotions than the low-conflict group. On the whole, the results demonstrated the utility of reversal theory constructs in explaining the interplay between the operative metamotivational state, reversal processes, and contextual features in emotional processes in the low-conflict and high-conflict mother daughter dyads. However the verbal, non-verbal, and cognitive factors that instigate reversals remain to be investigated

This study investigated the psychometric properties of Farsi version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 for 709 undergraduate students (416 females and 293 males) at the University of Tehran. All participants were asked to complete the Farsi version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (FTAS-20), the Emotional Intelligence Scale, and the Mental Health Inventory. Findings supported the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, concurrent validity, and three-factor structure of the Farsi version of the TAS-20. The factors found in the Farsi version of the TAS-20 are similar to the three factors found by Bagby, Parker and Taylor (1994) and were accordingly labeled as “Difficulty Identifying Feelings” (DIF), “Difficulty Describing Feelings” (DDF) and “Externally-Oriented Thinking” (EOT). Results of this study provide evidence supporting the cross-cultural validity of the TAS-20 and its applicability in Iran.