Further investigation of the self-presentation hypothesis.

Discusses A. Fontana, E. Klein, E. Lewis, and L. Levine's data supporting their self-presentation hypothesis which maintains that "mental illness" is not an illness at all but a socially undesirable mode of behavior. Several methodological problems in the study are noted. A more reliable means of selecting healthy and sick presenters, as well as a 2 (healthy vs. sick presenter) * 2 (anticipation vs. no anticipation of evaluative feedback) * 3 (positive, negative, no feedback) design, was used in a study with 84 male schizophrenics. A critical mode of self-presentation by feedback interaction predicted by the self-presentation hypothesis was not found. The dependent measure was postscores minus prescores on the WAIS Digit Symbol tests. It is concluded that, at best, self-presentation effects are weak and unobserved by the current investigators (Beta error), or at worst the result of extraneous sources of variation. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)