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3 experiments were performed to evaluate the permanence of the interference with retention produced by posttrial ECS. The presence or absence of ECS, administered 30 sec. after training in a 1-trial procedure, was combined factorially with the presence or absence of foot shock in training. 20 mice per treatment combination were tested for retention of the aversively conditioned response over intervals of 1, 7, and 30 days. Nonspecific effects of ECS were ruled out on the basis of direct and indirect evidence. Specific interference with retention, attributable to ECS, persisted undiminished for 30 days and was judged to be relatively permanent.

General laws of psychophysiology have not yet been satisfactorily formulated, despite decades of research by psychologists, psychiatrists, and biologists. In recent years a shift of emphasis toward a psychosomatic approach to problems of human illness has occurred. This has resulted in greater concern with research directly applied to specific illnesses in attempts to pinpoint the role of disturbed emotions in their etiology.An essential problem in psychosomatic research is the inherent difficulty in determining what factors in the personality and which of its past experiences should properly be correlated with the symptoms of an organ dysfunction. In clinical studies variables are chosen in the psychological and in the somatic systems, and, without clear understanding of their dynamic and temporal relations, they become the basis for the presumed etiological understanding of the psychosomatic disease. Such formulations, attempting to relate two discrete proc-

Our theoretical concepts of anxiety and their possible applications to the study of psychosomatic problems have been reported previously.1 In a preliminary sketch of an experimental design, we indicated our purpose to evoke or augment free-floating anxiety in human subjects who were anxietyprone to some degree, in order to determine the level, trend, and change in anxiety and simultaneous changes in several other psychological and somatic variables. In other words, we wanted to alter the emotional equilibrium in order to evoke and measure concomitant changes in other somatic and psychological functions.This communication presents the methods used to stimulate anxiety through verbal and nonverbal communications in transactions between subject and psychiatrist in a particular setting, and to demonstrate the wide variety of possible meanings to the subject and the complicated effects that result from such a stimulation.It was planned to produce graded increments in the level of anxiety by the use of appropriate verbal and attitudinal stimuli during successive daily psychiatric inter¬ views, with an anxiety-prone subject se¬ lected from the inpatient population of this Institute. The psychiatrist had previous knowledge of the patient's illness, his life story, and a number of episodes in which free anxiety had been experienced in the past. After a preexperimental day intended to acclimatize the patient to the laboratory, we proposed to stimulate anxiety in a series of three successive days of experimentation.The position of the stress interview within the time span of the experimental days and its relation to other procedures of the study may be visualized in the accompanying Table. In order to appreciate the complexity of the stress interview, other factors in the setting should be known. Capable of influ¬ encing the stressor's attitudes and functions were other persons whose roles in the total situation were important. Among these were two psychiatric colleagues, acting as observers behind a one-way mirror, watch¬ ing every move and listening carefully. Each subject-patient had his personal therapist, who was interested in the procedure for many reasons and either joined the observ¬ ers behind the one-way mirror or questioned his patient in a later therapeutic session regarding the effects of the experimental procedure. Naturally, the therapist did not want his patient unduly upset, nor did he approve of interference with his therapy. However, soon it became clear that the experimental procedures, particularly the stress interview, elicited information which was helpful to the therapist. Often the Stressor arranged for a consultation with the therapist to communicate this information, so that soon an implicit demand on the Stressor to "give" something of value to the therapist became a common occurrence.

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