Measures of dental beliefs and attitudes: their relationships with measures of fear.

Emergency dental and fearful dental patients were questioned in order to investigate the relationship between dental fear and different dental beliefs. The instruments used were the dental anxiety scale and the dental beliefs survey. The study also evaluated a Swedish version of the beliefs survey. The mean anxiety scale scores were 9.4 for emergency and 16.8 for fearful patients. The average beliefs survey item values ranged from 1.6 to 2.6 and 1.7 to 3.8 among the two groups respectively. There were clinical meaningful and statistically significant correlations between the anxiety scale and the beliefs survey. Each of the four dimensions of the beliefs survey (communication, control, belittlement and trust), also correlated with the anxiety scale of which the most clearly defined was belittlement.