Values, personality, physical characteristics, and refractive error

A questionnaire containing: (a) a questionnaire of physical characteristics associated with psychosomatic symptoms, (b) questions to determine the presence of myopia or hypermetropia but not the amount of error, (c) a shortened version of the Gough Adjective Check List, and (d) the Heist and Yonge Omnibus Personality Inventory were administered to 782 introductory psychology students attending Washington State University. This group consisted of 297 self-identified myopes (117 males, 180 females), 439 emmetropes (207 males, 232 females), and 46 hypermetropes (15 males, 31 females). Results indicated that myopes and nonmyopes differed from one another with respect to their value systems, personality, and physical characteristics as assessed by the components of the questionnaire. Differences in these characteristics were consistently found by all assessment techniques to exist most often between myopes and hypermetropes and between emmetropes and hypermetropes rather than between myopes and emmetropes. In general myopes exhibited a personality pattern of introversion, whereas hypermetropes maintained a pattern described as extroverted.