The Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scale Revised

P.E. Sifneos, MD, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Hospital, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215 (USA) Although it is a well-known fact that the measurement of alexithymic characteristics is inadequate, because no perfect instrument has been devised as yet for that task, nevertheless the 2 most commonly used questionnaires are the Beth Israel Questionnaire (BIQ) and the SchallingSifneos Personality Scale (SSPS). The BIQ is based on an interview with a patient and is scored by the evaluator. It is a forcedchoice questionnaire and ideally it should be standardardized so that all evalua-tors who use it ask similar questions. This is difficult indeed, because interviewing styles vary greatly. The key questions in the BIQ are No. 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 16. Questions 2 and 6 should be answered No and the others Yes. A score of 5-8 denotes alexithymic characteristics while as score of 0-5 falls within the normal range. The BIQ appears in appendix 1. The SSPS was devised in an effort to simplify the measurement of alexithymia. It is a questionnaire which gives the patient 4 different choices to answer 20 questions. One of the difficulties of the SSPS has to do precisely with the 4 choices available: (A) does not apply at all; (B) does not apply very much; (C) applies very much, and (D) applies completely. Patients usually tend to avoid the extremes A and D. The SSPS appears in appendix 2. Although both of these instruments are far from being ideal to measure alexithymia, nevertheless they seem to have some value in distinguishing individuals with alexithymic characteristics from normal people. In an effort to improve the measurement of alexithymia, an attempt will be made to correlate the SSPS with the BIQ. This revised SSPS (SSPS-R) has also forced-choice questions similar to the BIQ. In addition there are 2 questions for each one of the key 8 BIQ questions (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 16). 162 Sifneos