1998 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 51-58
Recentily, much research regarding occupational diseases has shown that dentists are subject to considerable psychological stress in the work place. Psychological stress during treatment is thought generally to be related to the age, years of clinical experience, sex, and personality of the dentist. Whether one stress is subject to the recognition of the situation as stressful is determined by the mutual interaction of life environment and personality. We examined the relationship between psychological stress scores, clinical experience and sex, but found no relationship, In the present study, we examined the relationship between the psychological stress scores of dentists during the treatment of children and the personalities of the dentist. The findings were as follows:
1. A study of personality types showed that the D-type (director type) accounted for the largest percentage of dentists (33.3), while 25.0% the C-type (calm type).20.5% the A-type (average type),12.5% the B-type (blast type), and 8.3% the E-type (escape type).
2. We also analyzed the results in three grorps of items: emotional stability (D: depression, C: cyclic tendency, I: inferiority feelings, N: nervousness), social adaptability (O: lack of objectivity, Co: lack of cooperativeness, Ag: lock of agreeableness), and social direction (G: general activity, R: rhathymia, T: thinking extraversion, A: ascendance, S: social extraversion). We found a signigicant correlation (0.05 level) between the psychological stress scores and social direction. No significant correlations were found for emotional stability and social adaptability.
3. A significant correlation was found (0.05 level) between the psychological stress scores and the three scales for inferiority, general activity, and ascendance in the 12-scale YG personality test. No signigicant correlation was found with the other nine scales.
These results suggest that, regarding stress produced by children on dentists during treatment, the Psychological Stress Response Scale and YG Personality Test were effective for measuring social direction, but they were not effective for measuring emotional stability and social adaptability. We did find a relationship between the dentist's psychological stress scores of the dentist and social extraversion or social introversion.
