In the short-term therapy over 16 50-min. sessions of a compulsive personality, there were unanimous positive changes on 17 verbal measures, with no activity shown on one measure. The verbal measures of Mahl, Raimy, and Bugental were used, along with Bühler, Bühler, and Lefever's Basic Rorschach Score and a qualitative analysis of the Rorschach. There were indications of decreases in procrastination, narcissism, and disorderliness.

Free associations of adjectives to 10 pictures of black persons in various situations by two groups of 10 prejudiced white Southern student nurses in a verbal operant conditioning procedure was employed to reduce prejudice toward black people. Prejudice was measured by the California Ethnocentrism Scale, a 29-scale semantic differential of bipolar evaluative adjectives, and by a 5-min. sample of freely emitted adjectives. The 10 subjects in the two experimental groups and in the control group were first evaluated for prejudice in a group setting and then in the individual conditioning session, to determine their base level. During conditioning the two experimental groups were reinforced with “good” for every favorable adjective emitted, while the control group received none. As expected, positive adjectives increased and negative ones decreased, and scores on the semantic differential and the Ethnocentrism scale were consistent. Prejudiced subjects were ready to respond with a highly unfavorable attitude with reference peers and to give more favorable responses individually to the experimenter. After the individual conditioning of the positive concept, the tendency was to return to the original level of unfavorable responsiveness or to retain the original prejudiced attitude. This effect was called the “rho phenomenon” of concept change. The influence of social status and suggestibility on the “rho phenomenon” needs further research.

Five experiments were designed to study the acquisition of inhibition as a negative drive in the personality of paranoid schizophrenics, as contrasted with the personality of sociopaths, where excitation is the prevalent drive. This drive of inhibition was considered as acquired in the learning situation of maternal control and its reduction depends upon an atmosphere of freedom. Latency of reaction to the cessation of a negative stimulus was used to measure the presence, acquisition, and reduction of the drive of inhibition. Inhibition was verified as a drive among paranoid schizophrenics and was viewed as increasing and decreasing by experimental manipulation as other drives. Its acquisition was related to the learning situation of maternal control. A free atmosphere of self-determination was basic to the reduction of inhibition.

In this investigation psychological tests were used to study the performance of patients with various forms of epilepsy. A pilot study suggested that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy perform more poorly than patients with centrencephalic or diffuse epilepsy on a test of memory and that the reverse might be true on a test of attention. The memory and attention test were therefore administered to a larger, independent sample of epileptic patients which consisted of two groups with focal epilepsy (39 cases with temporal lobe and 18 with frontal lobe foci) and one group with nonfocal epilepsy (19 cases of whom 14 were of the centrencephalic variety). The several groups were matched by statistical means to control for differences in intelligence, age, duration of illness, seizure frequency, and amount of EEG abnormality. When analyzed in this manner, the results support the preliminary finding that the nonfocal (centrencephalic) patients perform more poorly than the focal patients on the test of attention; there were, however, no significant differences among groups on the memory test. Possible reasons for the inconsistent results on the memory test are discussed. The impairment of the nonfocal (centrencephalic) patient on the attention test is interpreted in terms of the Penfield and Jasper hypothesis of subcortical dysfunction in this disease.

MIRSKY, ALLAN F. Ph.D.2; PRIMAC, DANIEL W. M.S.3; BATES, RICHARD B.S.4 Author Information

(1957). Colors and the Color-Blind. The Journal of General Psychology: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 229-240.

The purpose of the present investigation was to measure the effects of several centrally acting drugs on the performance of tasks designed primarily for studying the effects of brain damage. The tasks employed were the Continuous Performance Test1and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.2The Continuous Performance Test (C. P. T.), designed to measure sustained attention, is essentially a visual discrimination task, in which the subject must respond within short periods of time to briefly presented stimuli. In general, brain-damaged subjects perform more poorly on it than do non-brain-damaged controls. The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test was designed by Grant and Berg to provide quantitative measures of the kind of rigid and concrete performance that brain-damaged persons display on the Weigl-Goldstein-Scheerer3Color Form Sorting Test. A comparison on these tests of the effects of brain damage and the effects of centrally acting drugs, especially when the locus of