ABSTRACT
In pathopsychology, one branch of mental analysis, recently we are using qualitative analyzing methods for mental phenomena. But improvement of professional methods of study, generalization of the new computer based technology, children’s psychology assessment and many other problems are becoming an urgent issue in this field.Our study involved 45 children from orphanage and the High School Personality Questionnaire (HSPQ) computer based questionnaire is used to measure the personality characteristics of orphan children. Spielberg-Hanin test is used to reveal anxiety. Study is analyzed by SPSS program.In total, 45 children (age from 9 to 18), 22 boys and 23 girls participated in our survey. 8.9% of them measured as a high intelligence, 91.1% measured as a lower and an average intelligence. Interestingly, 60% of children were good at controlling their emotions and behavior. Thus 55.6%had symptoms of flexible mind, imagining and probability of affect illness. Having more stress is due to introverted preference and self-blaming, also a feeling of self-blaming is due to not being bold. 51.1% of them assessed that they have dependent, emulative personality and submissive behavior which was very considerably. The anxiety of condition was high in 34.1% of children andlow in 12.2% of them, thus anxiety of individual was high in 36.6% and low in 7.3% of children. Therefore, it’s essential to help orphan children and consider reducing anxiety and improving their self-independence.
ABSTRACT
WHO informed that across world an average of 565 young people aged 10 to 29 die every day through interpersonal violence. Some studies mentioned that anxiety was most frequently occurred as one of the psychological onsequences among victims of child abuse. Recent research on effects of adverse early life experiences on central nervous system as stress systems (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis-HPA) has provided a greater understanding of the link between childhood abuse and susceptibility to anxiety disorder. Therefore, this research was done to study anxiety among abused adolescents, some physical parameters and level of cortisol in saliva.Total number of participants were 149 children aged between 11-16 years (number cases were 53, matched control subjects were 96). The Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1997) is a 38-item self-report uestionnaire that assesses multiple symptoms of childhood anxiety isorders based on current diagnostic criteria. All participants were measured the cortisol in the saliva by Cortisol ELISA kit, Sigma, USA. Average age of all subjects in the study was 13.52±1.57 and 102 of all subjects were female and 47 were male. All anxiety symptoms of case group was statistically significance higher (p<0.01) than control group. The average amount of salivary cortisol of case group was (21.3±8.1 ng/ml) statistically significantly lower (p<0.01) than average amount of control group (31.56±16.9 ng/ml). Anxiety was more frequently occurred among abused children and blunted cortisol responses might indicate a level of impaired HPA functioning that could constitute a vulnerability to psychopathology with exposure to anxiety.