Emotional reactions to psychiatric patients. Analysis of a feeling checklist.

In psychodynamic milieu treatment, the relations between patients and nurses are the main tools for understanding and helping the patients. For this reason, it is important to construct methods to follow the development of relations and to study characteristics of helpful and nonhelpful relations. In this article, a checklist with feeling words given to nurses and aides in psychiatric treatment facilities is presented and its measurement properties are described. The analysis showed that the checklist as a whole measures the amount of emotional arousal in a reliable way. The individual feeling words have acceptable variance. A factor analysis gave a limited number of factors that are clinically understandable. The checklist seems to be well worth further study.