Relationship of Locus of Control to Phobic Anxiety and Depression

In some studies a relation was found between external locus of control orientation on the one hand and depression (Abramovicz, 1969) and phobic anxiety (Palmer, 1972) on the other hand. The present study concerns the relation between locus of control orientation, depression and phobic anxiety in a population of normal students (58 females, 54 males) and a group of agoraphobics (77 females, 22 males). Subjects were given the Fear Survey Schedule (Wolpe & Lang, 1964); Social Anxien, Scale (Willems, Tuender-de Haan. 8: Defares, 1973) ; Internal-External Control Scale (Rotter, 1966)3; and the Self-rating Depression Scale (Zung, 1965), with three items added, to fill in. Agoraphobics completed the scales individually, students in group sessions. Means and standard deviations on each measure are given in the table ( le f t ) , and Pearson product-moment correlations among the four scales on the right. For both groups the intercorrelations among the scales were positive. Since this study was only