The defining features of Type D personality, that is, tendencies to experience negative emotions and inability to express emotions, are the known risk factors of somatization tendencies.

Many depressive patients express their mental distress through somatic symptoms. Therefore, it may be worthwhile to investigate the relationship between Type D personality and complaints of somatic symptoms in depressive patients.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between type D personality and somatic symptom complaints in depressive patients.

Eighty-two individuals diagnosed with depressive disorder were included. Type D personality was measured with 14- item Type D personality Scale (DS14). Patient Health Questionnaire 9 and 15 were used to measure depression severity and somatization tendencies.

Two-thirds of the subjects were classified as Type D personality (63.4%). The mean PHQ-15 score of the Type D individuals was significantly higher than the remaining subjects (12.7 vs. 7.2, p=8.2E-6). The best regression model included age, PHQ-9 score and NA subscale score as predictor variables. Among these, only the coefficients of age (p=0.0015)and NA score (p=1.5E-7) was found to be statistically significant.

The result showed that Type D personality was one of the strong predictors of somatic complaints among depressive individuals. The finding that alexithymia was not shown to be a significant predictors also substantiated this discrepancy. However, it might be possible that the high correlation between NA and SI subscore (r=0.65) and between NA and TAS-20 score(r=0.44) hid the additional effects of social inhibition and alexithymia.