Self-Disclosure and Mental Health: A Problem of Confounded Measurement

This study suggests that the inconsistent findings from previous research on the relation between self-disclosure and adjustment may be due to the inclusion of items on the Jourard Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (JSDQ) that are confounded with symptoms of poor adjustment or psychopathology. One-hundred-twenty-two cases of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) major depression were compared with 197 well controls on the degree to which they reported self-disclosure on a 27-topic version of the JSDQ. JSDQ items were separated into symptom-independent and symptom-dependent subscales on the basis of ratings by clinical experts. Results confirmed the initial hypothesis, demonstrating that well controls were more likely than depressed cases to disclose symptom-independent topics but were not more likely to disclose symptom-dependent topics.