Comparison of Samoans in Samoa and California

To the Editor.—  Margaret Mead studied a group of teenaged Samoan girls and concluded that the Samoan lifestyle included early knowledge about sexual behavior, acceptance of masturbatory activity from the age of 5 or 6 years, and complete knowledge about bodily functions and left little possibility for neurotic problems.¹

Method.—  We previously studied 100 Samoans in California with the SCL-90R,² a self-completed 90-item symptom checklist, and scored the following items: (1) somatization, (2) obsessive-compulsive, (3) anxiety, (4) interpersonal sensitivity, (5) depression, (6) hostility, (7) phobic anxiety; (8) paranoid ideation, and (9) psychoticism. There are three general scales, as follows: the Global Severity Index, the Positive Symptom Distress Index, and the Positive Symptom Total.Compared with the scores of 1,000 normal Americans^{3. 4} the Samoans scored significantly higher on each and every scale. Fifty-seven percent of the males and 48% of the females had scores on one or