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Abstract

[Introduction] Patients express various symptoms that reflect their physical, mental and psychological conditions. Thus, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) emphasizes the relationship between physical and mental states. In the clinical practice of acupuncture and moxibustion, however, many patients chiefly cite physical complaints, and are often treated without a full discussion of their mental and psychological conditions. In TCM, feelings are divided into five categories: anger, happiness, concern, sadness, and fear. The relationship between these feelings and symptoms of disease of the five viscera is not clearly defined, so we attempted to clarify the correlations. This report presents the results of a survey on the traits and nature of anger and depression in terms of the five viscera.
[Methods] After obtaining informed consent was obtained, 102 students from a vocational school and our university (60 men and 42 women, average age 25 ± 8) participate in　this study. Three survey sheets were used: Oriental Medicine Health Questionnaire 57 (OHQ57) to measure the condition of the five viscera; 24 from the 34 items of the State-Trait Anger-expression Inventory (STAXI) for understanding the Trait Anger; and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) for assessing depression. The survey was conducted from June to July in 2012.
[Results] The average scores in OHQ57 were 5.1 ± 3.1 for liver (kan), 4.6 ± 3.2 for heart (shin), 5.2 ± 3.1 for spleen (hi), 3.8 ± 3.3 for lung (hai), and 3.9 ± 2.7 for kidney (jin). The average scores in STAXI were 23.0 ± 5.1 for trait anger, 18.8 ± 4.1 for anger-expression, 20.8 ± 3.8 for anger-suppression, and 18.9 ± 3.5 for a nger-control. The aver-age score in BDI was 12.4 ± 8.0. Significant correlations were found between state of anger and liver: anger-expression and liver/heart/lung in STAXI, and between depression and heart/ lung in BDI.
[Conclusion] The Suwen (“Basic Questions,” the oldest Chinese medical text) and other TCM literatures report that anger and depression are related to liver, and the results of this study confirmed the relationship between anger and liver. Based on factor analyses, scores of Trait Anger (intensity of anger) revealed that participants suspected of having diseases of liver tended to get angry easily and anger-expression (expression of anger) showed that these participants displayed both aggressive behavior and verbal assertion. On the other hand, latent factors of depression, possibly caused by diseases of liver, were not revealed in factor analyses, although depression was significantly correlated with heart and spleen.