f I "teE liking or dislike of one person for I another can be considered a linear di-•*• mension of feeling, ranging from an extreme negative pole through a neutral point to an extreme positive pole. In diis paper, the term "affect," defined by Murphy as "any specific kind of feeling or emotion, especially when it is attached to a particular object" (6, p. 979), will be narrowed in scope to include only this one dimension.If there are, as die literature suggests (8, 9, 10), circumstances in group therapy that lead to positive interpersonal affect, then it seems reasonable to presume that these conditions could be reproduced for experimental groups of normal subjects.Using two techniques of group leadership which differ only with respect to a few welldefined variables, it should be possible to determine which of these independent variables is related to the production of such positive feeling.
THE PROBLEMThis study is concerned with the effects of two contrasting group-leadership techniques -group-centered, akin to the activity-group therapy of Slavson (9), and leader-centered, patterned after traditional college classroom procedure-on interpersonal affect in the small face-to-face group. The major procedural difference between these two techniques is that member-to-member verbal interaction is fostered in group-centered and severely curtailed in leader-centered process. The differential effects of these two techniques on perception of an objective stimulus have been discussed previously (2).
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