Measures
The tools included basic data tables, Brief Psychiatric
Rating Scale (BPRS), Irrational Behavior
Scale, and Anger Expression Inventory.
1. The demographic data tables included the
patient’s gender, age, education level, religion,
antipsychosis medication, age at incidence,
and the time since incidence.
2. The BPRS measures severity of psychotic
symptoms. The internal consistency reliability
of this measure is between 0.67 and 0.88.
Five factors were assessed: depression-anxiety,
confused thinking, withdrawal-sluggish
cognitive processing, hostility-doubtfulness,
and strain-agitation (Morlan & Tan, 1998).
The BPRS grades every item from 0 to 6. Its
internal consistency reliability is 0.69 and it
has become one of many clinical and investigative
measures used to assess psychopathology
(Chang, Hwu & Wei, 1986).
3. The Irrational Behavior Scale is a five-point
Likert scale including 69 items. It mainly
measures the individual’s irrational thoughts
to oneself, for example, thoughts prefaced by
“I should,” “I must,” and “by all means,”
which reveal excessive self-expectations.
The higher the score, the higher the individual’s
degree of irrationality. The 2-week testretest
reliability is between 0.57 and 0.78.
The concurrent validity standard coefficient
is 0.74 (Yang, 1983) when using the “individual
existence faith” as index, which was
modified by S.L. Cai for measuring the