Exploring the relationship between levels of ego development and different groups of somatic symptoms: an association rule mining study

Classification of psychosomatic symptoms has been one of the constant challenges for researchers in this field and many different categories of these symptoms have been found in different studies. This issue has made the research and treatment of these disorders a challenge, and in order to better recognize and treat these symptoms, the relationship between each group of symptoms and psychological causes should be clarified.

The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the relationship between ego development and various psychosomatic symptoms using the method of discovering associative rules.

This was an exploratory cross-sectional research. For this purpose, 440 participants from the capital city of Tehran were recruited and completely answered the questions. The somatic symptoms checklist and The Washington University sentence completion test were used to collect data. The association rule mining method was used to analyze data.

At high levels of ego development, psychosomatic symptoms are not present, while at medium levels of ego development, all psychosomatic symptoms are present in a significant way. Also, at very low levels of ego development, only gastrointestinal symptoms are present.

These results indicate that gastrointestinal symptoms are developmentally similar to other psychosomatic symptoms, but they have a qualitative difference from other symptoms, which supports the theory of brain-gut axis malfunction in severe psychological disorders. The implication of these findings is that psychological and medical treatments must consider this difference it improves the treatment efficacy.