ArticleResearch in psychotherapy (Milano)2025
Applying the Defense Mechanisms Rating Scales Q-sort to assess patients' level of overall defensive functioning in interview data: validity and reliability.
Article in Research in psychotherapy (Milano), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Personality, Emotion Regulation, and Psychological Distress in Italian Women with Feeding and Eating Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The observer-rated Q-sort based on the gold-standard Defense Mechanisms Rating Scales (DMRS-Q) allows the investigation of defense mechanisms based on one session as a whole. The present study analyzed the reliability and validity of the DMRS-Q applied to three types of clinical interactions other than therapy sessions. Transcripts of three different clinical interviews, including a total of 233 adults (50 cancer patients who completed Mayman's Early Memory Interview [EMI], 93 individuals without clinical diagnosis who completed McAdams' Life Story Interview [LSI], and 90 pregnant women who completed the Working Model of the Child Interview [WMCI]), have already been coded on the DMRS. Our research team of expert raters conducted the DMRS-Q coding on these same transcripts and assessed the inter-rater reliability and the concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity of DMRS-Q in these clinical interactions. Results showed good inter-rater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC]=.70) for the Overall Defensive Functioning (ODF), although lower than reported using transcripts of psychotherapy sessions. Large correlations were found between ODF scales assessed with the DMRS-Q and the DMRS among the three samples (r=.43 to .59; p<.001), while small to moderate correlations were found between the DMRS-Q, sociodemographic, and psychological measures. The DMRS-Q ODF scale might be a valid and reliable measure to assess the overall maturity of defensive functioning in brief interviews. Its ease of use, supported by open-source software, enables the application of the gold-standard DMRS theory across a wide range of contexts beyond psychotherapy research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.