Associations of immature defense mechanisms with personal importance of junk food, television and alcohol are independent of age

摘要

We thank Potterat (Potterat, 2013) for his words of appreciation for our study (Costa and Brody, 2013), as well as for his request that we control for age in an additional analysis of the observed associations of immature defense mechanisms (poorer defensive functioning associated with personality disorder and related traits, and measured with the Defense Style Questionnaire-40 (Andrews et al., 1993; Bond, 2004)) with greater personal importance of junk food, alcohol, and television viewing. We also observed that importance of penile-vaginal intercourse (PV1) correlated positively with mature defenses and inversely with some component immature defenses. There were also significant positive intercor-relations between personal importance of alcohol, junk food, television, and noncoital sex (Costa and Brody, 2013).The original analysis (Costa and Brody, 2013) used rank-order correlation procedures (a conservative approach to dealing with the rating scales for personal importance), but the requested partial correlation procedures are based on linear correlation procedures. Therefore, we first present the simple (Pearson) intercorrelations between immature defenses, age, and personal importance of junk food, alcohol, television viewing, PVI, and noncoital sex (Table 1). Table 2 contains the requested partial correlation analyses, controlling for age (Table 2).