Psychological Defense and Personal Traits in Youth: Automation of Study Data Processing and Statistical Analysis

The basic problem we address during this study is to investigate by the Kellerman-Plutchick Life Style Index the characteristics of psychological defense in the youth, concentrating on determining the average activation level and searching for the ways of changing the intensity of different defense mechanisms. We analyze specific characteristic features of psychological defense mechanisms among the youth and their correlations with different psychological features (personal traits, temperament, accentuations, risk inclination, new sensation seeking) and create the psychological portraits of young persons, specific for each of the basic mechanisms of psychological defense. We place high emphasis on risk behavior analysis. Mathematical statistics techniques (primary statistics, Student’s ttest, Pearson’s r, factor analysis, linear regressions, multivariate regressions) which have been used for data processing are also described in the article.