Exploring More on the Effects of Psychological Self-Help Paperbacks

Abstract

Three studies examined the influence of paperbacks about psychological self-help on responses to personality questionnaires. Each study consisted of a 2 × 3 design that varied presence or absence of a pretest on a personality questionnaire and an intervening treatment condition which involved reading either one of two self-help books or reading no book. The dependent measures were posttest scale scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, the Tennessee Self-concept Scale and the 16 Personality Factors questionnaire. The effects of 6 self-help paperbacks, tested in pairs, were examined over the 3 experiments. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that the reading condition was nonsignificant across all experiments while the pretest condition was a significant factor for only one questionnaire.