Psychosomatic Medicine 20:314-320 (1958)
© 1958 American Psychosomatic Society

Modifications of the Oropharyngeal Bacteria with Changes in the Psychodynamic State

II. A Validation Study

¹ Department of Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine and the Psychosomatic Service of the Cincinnati General Hospital Cincinnati, Ohio.

An experiment was carried out to validate the findings of a previous study which suggested an association between a subject's psychodynamic state and the relative number of streptococci cultured from her oropharynx. Specifically, the psychophysiologic relationship indicated in the preliminary study was as follows: When the patient's intense dependent wishes were inhibited from expression because of feelings of shame and guilt, and when the patient attempted to resolve this conflict by the compromise of accepting or seeking punishment and the enhancement of suffering to gain support, attention, or human contact, the streptococcus colony counts in her throat cultures tended to be very high.

When she was attempting to resolve her conflicts without using such masochistic devices and when she was finding herself a more worthwhile person, these bacterial counts were relatively low.

Immediately after a bacteriologic culture of the patient's throat was obtained, tape-recorded verbal samples were elicited from the patient. These were quantitatively analyzed for their psychologic content by means of a system of verbal analysis.

In an initial 20 trials a significant correlation ( = 0.41; P < 0.05) was demonstrated between the psychologic and bacteriologic variables. The comparison of scores obtained from another 12 verbal samples and throat cultures again revealed a significant correlation ( = 0.51; P < 0.05). Combining these 32 rankings of psychologic state and comparing them to the bacteriologic rankings gave an over-all correlation of 0.46. These correlations reach convincing levels of statistical significance.