Defense Mechanism Questionnaire (DMQ-30)

Thirty statements describe characteristic ways of handling stress and conflict. The Mature style includes humor, anticipation and sublimation: facing difficulties directly and turning them to good use. The Neurotic style includes undoing, reaction formation and idealization: managing anxiety in ways that keep conflict partly out of view. Immature Action includes acting out, passive aggression and help-rejecting complaining: discharging tension through behavior. Immature Disavowal includes denial, projection and rationalization: keeping unwelcome facts or feelings out of awareness.

Defense mechanisms were first described in psychoanalysis, and Vaillant (1977) arranged them in a hierarchy from immature to mature on the basis of a long-term study of adult development, finding that more mature defenses accompanied better adjustment over the life span. Questionnaire research later grouped defenses into styles, and this independently written instrument organizes items from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) into four styles of that kind.

Each style is scored separately, and the four scores are read as a profile. Higher scores describe more frequent reliance on that style; lower scores describe less. Everyone uses all four to some degree, and immature defenses are common under stress; what the profile shows is the balance a person tends to strike, not a fixed category.

The questionnaire is used in psychodynamic therapy, in research on coping and personality, and for self-understanding. On this site, the Ego Function Assessment (EFA-36) describes broader ego functioning, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) measures reappraisal and suppression from a cognitive tradition, and the Social Desirability scales include self-deceptive enhancement, a related concept.

The construct domains (mature, neurotic, action-level, and distress-based defense styles) come from the defense-style research tradition. Items were constructed in the IPIP tradition to operationalize these defense style constructs using public-domain language.

“Work hard.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.