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General practitioners attending post‐graduate courses from various parts of Britain were studied. Two personality tests were used, the Complexity and the Thinking‐introversion scales. The doctors also completed a questionnaire evaluating their preferred method of approach to their patients' psychological disorders. An earlier analysis had shown that doctors' general tendency to either a physical or to a psychological bias was associated with their degree of reflectiveness, as measured by the Thinking‐introversion scale. The present analysis explored whether that factor, and also a second trait, the need for closure under conditions of uncertainty, influenced the clinical preferences of the doctors; the effect of ageing on style of practice was also studied.
Walton et al. (Wed,) studied this question.