Sex role attributes, symptom distress, and defensive style among college men and women.

Administered the Personality Research Form-Andro Scale Masculinity and Femininity subscales, the Symptom Check List-90 (Revised), and the Defense Mechanism Inventory to 84 male and 90 female undergraduates. Results indicate that interrelations among sex-role attributes, defense preferences, and symptom distress differed for men and women. Cross-sex-typed Ss mostly accounted for differences in symptom distress within each sex: Masculine women reported relatively low and feminine men reported relatively high degrees of symptom distress. In addition, sex roles interacted with sex in determining defense preferences. The possibility that defensive styles mediated between sex-role attributes and symptom distress was also explored. Among women, an association between masculine attributes and a rejection of self-blaming defenses accounted for the negative relation between masculinity attributes and symptom distress. Among men, sex-role attributes and defensive styles, for the most part, contributed independently to symptom distress. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)