Psychiatric symptoms and conflict among personal plans.

In everyday life, the existence of personal goals is indicated by the activities in which people are engaged, such as leisure interests, occupation and relationships. Incompatibility between goals was predicted to be one source of conflict associated with poor mental health symptoms. A series of studies using different methods (interviews and questionnaires) to measure the degree of perceived conflict in the daily activities of young and mature students and non-student adults is reported. Two forms of conflict are described - explict (between two or more activities) and implicit (the importance of the activity to the individual). The results show that younger and mature students (particularly women) show correlations between their conflict and symptom scores, unlike other survey groups. The transitional nature of the student role may create a situation where the conflict experienced by many in their everyday activities is aggravated, and which is more readily expressed by psychiatric symptoms than in other ways.