Relationship of Self-Esteem, Manifest Anxiety, and Obsessive-Compulsiveness to Personal Habits

Abstract

75 women and 64 men responded to the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory, the Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Maudsley Obsessional-compulsive Inventory in addition to responding to a questionnaire on personal habits. The results indicated that more frequent hair-pullers and nervous twitchers scored lower on self-esteem and higher on anxiety. People who giggled and those who bit their fingernails more often scored higher on obsessive-compulsiveness. Self-reported gigglers were higher on manifest anxiety. If the criterion of self-assessed seriousness of the behavior problem was used, people who bit their nails, picked their noses, pulled their hair, chewed on objects, giggled, ground their teeth, twitched nervously, and picked at scabs scored lower on self-esteem. Higher manifest-anxiety scores were found among the people who regarded their nail-biting, hair-pulling, object-chewing, nervous twitching, or giggling as serious problems. Finally, people who regarded their nail-biting as more serious tended to have higher obsessive-compulsive scores. The results in general suggest that the frequency of several of these behaviors is anxiety-related and that it is the person's assessments of these behaviors as problems rather than simply their frequency that is related to higher anxiety and lower self-esteem.