The effects of chlorpromazine on GSR conditioning.

Research had suggested that chlorpromazine reduces anxiety and, from another line of research, that there is a positive relationship between degree of anxiety and ease of conditioning. The present research aimed at an assessment of the combination of these findings, viz., if chlorpromazine reduces anxiety, and lowered anxiety (reduced drive) decreases the ease of obtaining a conditioned response, then GSR conditioning should decrease with patients taking chlorpromazine. The results were in the hypothesized direction. Dosage of chlorpromazine was related to decrease in conditioning ability, with a moderate dosage (275-410 mg. per day) most effective in making conditioning difficult. 15 refs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

GSR conditioning, anxiety, and extraversion.

"Hypotheses by Eysenck and Spence relating GSR conditioning to extraversion and anxiety, respectively, were examined… [Ss] scoring on the extremes of anxiety and extraversion were selected… . Using a conditioned response amplitude measure,… a significant positive relationship was found between anxiety and conditioning. No significant relationship was found between extraversion and conditioning… . The results give clear support to Spence's theory while failing to support that of Eysenck." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4CG27B. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some relationships between GSR conditioning and judgments of anxiety.

"The aim of the present study was to investigate… the relationship between GSR conditioning and various clinical judgments of anxiety in a sample of psychiatric patients conditioned under presumably optimal procedures… . anxiety groups ranked on the basis of admission psychological data… were found to be significantly different in conditionability." This was not so with Ss ranked via the Taylor MA scale, and "anxiety groups revealed no significant differences in extinction." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

GSR conditioning and personality factors in alcoholics and normals.

Alcoholic and nonalcoholic introversive and extroversive Ss were placed in a GSR conditioning situation. Significant differences in conditionability were not found between alcoholics and the nonalcoholic group with regard to the intro-extroversion dimension. The results were seen as confirming aspects of Eysenck's (1957) theory of personality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

GSR conditioning in anxiety states, normals, and chronic functional schizophrenic subjects.

"Conditioning of the GSR to electric shock in 60 hospitalized anxiety states, 60 normal controls, and 60 chronic functional schizophrenics yielded the following… [results]: With magnitude of response (in log conductance units) during experimental extinction as an indirect measure of strength of conditioning, and anxiety Ss showed significantly stronger conditioning than both the normal and schizophrenic Ss, the difference in response magnitude being some increasing function of the number of extinction trials, as shown by a significant interaction term." (28 ref.) From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:1HK83H. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Studies in efficiency: Muscle-action patterns in reaction time as related to GSR conditioning.

A significant interaction between degree of efficiency in reaction time and in meeting task requirements in the GSR conditioning situation was found, such that efficient Ss tended to take longer to reach criterion under instructions to relax, while there was no difference between the groups when the requirement was to solve a problem. Under the relax instructions the correlation of right- to left-arm tension with trials to successive CRs was .60; under problem instructions it was -.04. Taken together with the previous studies, these results are interpreted as support for the method of analysis implied by the concept of efficiency. They prepare the way for further tests of the hypothesis that efficiency will be related to degrees of psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The GSR in the detection of guilt.

How accurate is a lie detector in determining guilt? "Forty-nine male college students, after random assortment into four groups, were required to enact one, both, or neither of two mock crimes. All were then given a guilty knowledge test, employing the GSR, which used six standard questions relating to each of the two crimes. A simple, objective, and a priori scoring system was used to determine guilt. Forty-four or 89.8% of the Ss were assigned to their correct group, against a chance expectancy of 25%. Considering the crimes separately, all Ss innocent of a crime were correctly classified, while 44 or 50 interrogations of guilty Ss gave guilty classifications, a total of 93.9% correct classification against a chance expectancy of 50%… . Detection of guilty knowledge… is demonstrably capable of very high validity in those situations where it can be used." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive factors in differential conditioning of the GSR: Use of a reaction time task as the UCS with normals and schizophrenics.

22 normals and 22 schizophrenics underwent differential conditioning of the GSR, using 8-sec tones of differing frequencies as the CSs, an 8-sec CS-UCS interval, and a UCS comprised of an RT task signaled by a low-intensity light. Both intertrial reports and postconditioning interviews were obtained. 12 Ss in the normal group verbalized the CS relations accurately, compared to 3 Ss in the schizophrenic group. The normal group showed significant GSR differentiation, though conditioning was limited to the group of accurately verbalizing Ss. No evidence for conditioning was obtained in the schizophrenic group. Normal Ss had faster RTs than schizophrenic Ss. The RT of accurately verbalizing normals was shorter than that of inaccurately verbalizing normals, and the degree of GSR differentiation was significantly correlated with RT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitudes established by classical conditioning.

"2 experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that attitude responses elicited by a word can be conditioned to a contiguously presented socially significant verbal stimulus… . In Experiment I, one national name was paired with positive evaluative meaning and another was paired with negative evaluative meaning. In Experiment II, familiar masculine names were used. In each experiment there was significant evidence that meaning responses had been conditioned to the names without Ss' awareness." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extinction during psychotherapy of GSR accompanying embarrassing statements.

"Statements by a therapy patient acknowledging personal sexual behavior or desires were frequently accompanied during early hours of therapy with galvanic skin responses, but not during later hours, following a progressive decline. This finding is taken as evidence that the GSR is associated with such feelings as fear or embarrassment in the interpersonal relationship with the therapist and that such feelings extinguish during therapy." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of music upon GSR of depressives and schizophrenics.

Using GSR as a measure of emotionality, 2 groups of patients (depressives and schizophrenics) were exposed to 2 kinds of music (exciting and calming). In general, the music was seen to have the predicted effect on all the patients. The depressives responded more to the music characterized as exciting than the schizophrenics. Music was seen to be a factor which could alter the subjective emotional experience of psychotic patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Heart rate and GSR concomitants of vigilance and arousal.

In an experiment with 16 male undergraduates, Ss receiving high shock were considerably more autonomically aroused than low shock Ss, as indicated both by an index of GSR, and by heart rate uncorrected for base level. When corrected, heart rate did not differentiate between Ss receiving high and low level shock. In a within Ss comparison, however, UCS temporal uncertainty generated lower corrected heart rate than UCS-certainty, and did so independently of shock level. It is unlikely that UCS-uncertainty was less anxiety arousing than UCS-certainty; indeed, GSR data suggest the contrary. The decrease in heart rate during UCS-uncertain trials is presumed to be a function of Ss' increased vigilance for uncertainty removing cues. The cognitive orientation toward environmental intake which such vigilance implies should, according to J. I. Lacey, be accompanied by cardiac deceleration. It is argued that such cognitive aspects of cardiac functioning are superimposed over gross cardiac responsiveness to autonomic arousal. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioning and generalization of GSR as a function of awareness.

"This study was essentially a replication of… (an) experiment on the unconscious conditioning of autonomic responses. When… (the previous) methods of data analysis were used, their results in general were confirmed." Limitations and critique of the previous methodology is offered, and its effect on the results obtained is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extraversion and the acquisition of eyeblink and GSR conditioned responses.

A summary is given of studies relating eyeblink and GSR conditioning to the personality dimension of extraversion (E). It is found that extraverts are poorer in eyeblink conditioning when conditions favor the development of inhibition, as by the use of partial reinforcement; they do not differ from introverts when conditions are such as to preclude the development of inhibition. Extraverts are poorer in GSR conditioning when relatively mild stimuli are used, but do not differ from introverts when very strong stimuli are used, making impossible the development of cortical inhibition. They are also poorer than introverts when discrimination learning is involved, facilitating the growth of inhibition. Correlations between conditioning and personality appear to be dependent on the suitability of experimental conditions to evoke cortical inhibition; correlations are process and not status functions. These findings have implications for the problem of the generality of the hypothetical factor of "conditionability." (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between GSR and speech disturbances in psychotherapy.

"… the relationship between points of emotional arousal or anxiety as defined by the GSR and the occurrence of speech disturbances in psychotherapy [was investigated]. Synchronized GSR and verbal recordings… provided the basic data." Speech disturbances were maximal at times coincident with GSR deflections and decreased in frequency on either side of GSR deflections. Additional validity is provided for both speech disturbances and the GSR as measures of momentary changes in anxiety level in psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Backward conditioning: Mediation by the context.

The information acquired in backward conditioning (i.e., outcome→cue) was assessed in 3 Pavlovian lick-suppression experiments with water-deprived rats as subjects. Experiment 1 confirmed previous research that few outcome→cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned excitor and additionally showed that massive posttraining extinction of the training context attenuated a backward-trained cue's excitatory value. Experiment 2 found that many outcome→cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned inhibitor and that the same context manipulation attenuated this inhibitory value. Experiment 3 confirmed the observations of Experiments 1 and 2 and demonstrated that these effects of context extinction were specific to backward-trained cues conditioned in the extinguished context. These results are interpreted in terms of cue→context and context→outcome associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship between GSR and anxiety indexes in projective drawings.

96 male college students drew a man, a woman, and an automobile while continuous GSRs were obtained. A significant difference was found in the degree of anxiety for the 3 drawings. The auto yielded the lowest level of anxiety, and the woman drawing the highest level of anxiety. Adaptation differences were found for 7 of the graphic anxiety indexes. For the man drawing, secondary sexual body parts yielded the most anxiety, followed by the sexual body area. The sequence was the opposite for the woman drawing. Low but significant correlations were found between 10 of the 23 possible graphic indexes and either GSR frequency or conductance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Augmentation of taste conditioning by a preconditioned odor.

Five experiments explored facilitated taste-aversion conditioning (odor-mediated taste augmentation), using rats that experienced odor (A) and taste (X) in an A+/AX+ design. Augmentation occurred when the stimuli were presented simultaneously during AX+ conditioning, and significantly weaker conditioning occurred after a sequential presentation (Exp 1). Exps 2 and 3 demonstrated that augmented conditioning decreased if the odor aversion was reduced through preexposure or extinction following A+ conditioning. A second-order conditioning explanation was not supported by the results of Exp 4. Exp 5 showed that extinction of the odor aversion after AX + conditioning did not alter the strength of the augmented taste aversion. Odor-mediated taste augmentation is similar to potentiation, in which odor and taste cues operate in a synergistic, not competitive, manner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Supernormal conditioning.

In Experiment 1, rats received an A+AX° discrimination in which food was presented after Stimulus A by itself but not after a simultaneous compound of A with Stimulus X. AX was then paired with food in a 2nd stage, followed by test trials with A alone. Responding on the test trials with A was more vigorous than during a control stimulus that had been consistently paired with food. The remaining experiments were of similar design to Experiment 1, except that the 2nd stage also contained conditioning trials with X. The results from the test trials were essentially the same as for Experiment 1. The high level of responding during the test trials with Stimulus A is regarded as evidence of supernormal conditioning. Overall, the results are more consistent with a configural than an elemental theory of conditioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)