Association of Defense Mechanisms with Anxiety Depression and Stress Among Adolescents

The present study was undertaken to examine the association of defense mechanisms with anxiety, depression and stress among adolescents. The total sample comprised 240 adolescents studying in class +1 and +2. The sample was selected randomly from Government Senior Secondary Schools of Ludhiana district of Punjab and equally distributed across two genders (males= 120 & females=120). Aself- structured personal information sheet, Defense Mechanisms Inventory (Mrinal & Singhal, 2012) and Anxiety, Depression and Stress Scale (Bhatnagar et al., 2020) were used to collect relevant information from the respondents. The results revealed that major proportion of adolescents were at high level of using defense mechanisms and only 5 per cent were at low level. Majority of adolescents had low level of anxiety, depression and stress. Furthermore, overall defense mechanisms were found to be non-significantly correlated with overall anxiety, depression and stress except one dimension of defense mechanisms, viz.,'Turning Against Object' which was found to be significantly and positively correlated with anxiety and stress among rural boys