Abstract
Team medical care that includes a clinical psychologist is known to be effective in the treatment of obesity. Moreover, the use of personality scales as one of the tools for understanding psycho-social variables related to both obesity patients and treatment personnel has provided valuable information. Although research on the association between personality and obesity has increased rapidly, only a few studies have been conducted with Japanese obesity patients. In this study, we used the following personality scales : Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R), Tokyo University Egogram II (TEGII), and Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20) to investigate differences between obesity patients that visited a university hospital and non-clinical adults (healthy control group). The responses of the two groups to the personality scales were analyzed using t-tests. Results indicated no significant difference between the groups. Then, the obesity patients were classified into three groups based on their BMI and their responses were reanalyzed using analyses of variance. The results indicated obesity patients with a BMI of over 35 (class II) had significantly higher neuroticism scores (especially anxiety and depression), as well as difficulties in identifying feelings. These results suggest that personality assessment would be useful in medical interventions for obesity patients with a high BMI.
