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N A recent publication (14, p. 100), we asserted without documentation that "psychiatric diagnosis is too unreliable to permit derivation from our data of substantial conclusions...." At the time that this statement was written, it was the authors' impression that such a proposition was widely accepted and rested securely upon a solid foundation of published evidence. Other writers have made use of this same rationalization for discrediting the use of psychiatrically diagnosed criterion groups (e.g., 7, 13), but during one of our mea culpa moods it occurred to us to ask, "Just how unreliable are psychiatric diagnoses anyhow?" The present communication is a report of our odyssey in search of an answer to that question.

The preceding review of the literature leaves no definite conclusions to be drawn as to the effectiveness of praise and blame as incentives to learning. This has been brought about, it is felt, through there being no clear-cut conception of the basic principles involved, or through a nonrealization or non-differentiation of what was being sought and what was actually being done. The groups employed as subjects in this experiment were comprised of the following: 85 boys and 81 girls from six 7th grade classes, and 84 boys and 102 girls from six 8th grade classes, all from the Woodland Way Junior High School in Hagerstown, Maryland (population, approximately 35,000); 192 boys from six high school classes at McDonogh School, McDonogh, Maryland (a private boys' school near Baltimore); and a college group of 30 men. The apparatus employed with the college subjects was standard laboratory equipment for measuring the physiological changes of blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: to seek an answer to the question of the effects of Praise and Blame as incentives in learning; to observe the effects of different testers; and to determine the attendant emotional aspects, as evidenced from physiological changes recorded on a kymograph. This investigation was not concerned with testing the effects of Praise or Blame as psychological opposites, but rather their effectiveness, per se, in producing a change in the learning situation. The statements of Praise or Reproof were administered rather much as would be done in any routine classroom situation of like nature; but with the precaution that no external factors of either tester would bias the results.

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