Fingernail bitting

This study explored the incidence of three personal habits and their correlates with popular tensional outlets. The 108 men and 202 women college students estimated how often they bit their fingernails, picked their noses, chewed on pencils or other objects, used specific tobacco products, used specific caffeine products, chewed gum, and exercised. Also, they rated their happiness on a seven-point scale in Likert format. The fingernail-biting incidence observed here was higher than was reported in previous samples of young adults, and more men than women were nail-biters...

75 women and 64 men responded to the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory, the Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Maudsley Obsessional-compulsive Inventory in addition to responding to a questionnaire on personal habits. The results indicated that more frequent hair-pullers and nervous twitchers scored lower on self-esteem and higher on anxiety. People who giggled and those who bit their fingernails more often scored higher on obsessive-compulsiveness. Self-reported gigglers were higher on manifest anxiety. If the criterion of self-assessed seriousness of the behavior problem was used, people who bit their nails, picked their noses, pulled their hair, chewed on objects, giggled, ground their teeth, twitched nervously, and picked at scabs scored lower on self-esteem...

To examine the relative risk of transmission of the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) through bites and scratches, we studied 198 health care workers, 30 of whom were traumatized in this fashion while caring for an aggressive AIDS patient. This violent patient frequently bit or scratched others, his mouth had blood and saliva, while his fingernails were at times soiled with semen, feces, and urine. He was HIV antibody and antigen positive. Although HIV was recovered from his peripheral blood lymphocytes, after 2...