In their recent paper on smoking and personality, McManus & Weeks (1982) administered the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and questionnaires regarding smoking to 100 subjects, and calculated correlations between the personality traits measured (psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism, and lie scale scores) and smoking. Contrary to expectation, there was no correlation with extraversion (E), only slight correlation with neuroticism, but a significant correlation with psychoticism (P). They argue that the lack of correlation with E is due to the changed contents of the scale, which has been changed from earlier versions, such as the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI), by the omission of some impulsiveness items. They quote a paper by Rocklin & Revelle (1981) which argues in a similar vein.

This paper analyses patterns of episodes of anxiety and depression as recorded by 22 general practices which took part in the Second National Morbidity Survey (RCGP, 1980). The data comprise 6 years′ records. Simple Markov chains are fitted to each age-group of men and women, and the inter-practice variation in the resulting parameter estimates are compared, using Andrews′ plots and principal components plots. The implications for the presentation and interpretation of data from large-scale morbidity surveys are discussed.

The development and promotion of a ‘common language’ in the mental health field is a lasting objective of the World Health Organization. In the 1960s, experts from 35 countries participated in the WHO programme on the standardization of psychiatric diagnosis, classification and statistics which reviewed the state of the field and resulted in the glossary of mental disorders, first produced as a companion to ICD-8 and later incorporated, with modifications, in Chapter V of ICD-9.