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Paradoxical intention has been shownto improve sleep performance in chronic insomniacs, presumably by interrupting their overly anxious sleep efforts. Instructions to simply give up such sleep intentions-without trying to stay awake -could have a similar effect. Giving-up instructions framed as a paradoxical sleep-improvement method ("try giving up") were compared here with giving up presented as a way to improve nighttime comfort and morning restedness without any sleep improvement ("give up trying"), along with a placebo-attention (self-monitoring) treatment. Each of these three treatments was embodied in a printed booklet delivered by mail to a group of 11-12 chronic insomniacs recruited from the general community. All three treatment groups improved in daily sleep estimates ("sleep efficiency") after treatment, but only the givingup groups improved on a self-report measure of sleep performance anxiety. Such a reduction in performance anxiety may be an important therapeutic outcome, with or without sleep improvement.

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The present experiment demonstrates that the effects of delay of knowledge of results (KR) in a line drawing task depend upon the dependent variable which is considered and the original response tendency of the subjects. Delay of KR interfered with the acquisition of the correct response when number of correct responses is the dependent variable. When KR was omitted the immediate-KR group continued to make more correct responses than the delayed-KR group. However, there was a significant reduction in correct responses for both groups. When absolute error was the response measure there were no significant differences between immediate-and delayed-KR groups either during acquisition or extinction. Analysis of the type of response made during extinction suggested that the overshooting effect obtained by previous investigators may be typical of short responders trained under conditions of immediate reinforcement but not of those trained under delayed-KR. Greenspoon and Foreman (1956) obtained clear cut evidence that the effectiveness of knowledge of results (KR) in a line drawing task varies inversely with the time delay between the response and KR. On the other hand, Bilodeau and Bilodeau (1958) were unable to demonstrate a similar effect in five different experiments. Bilodeau and Ryan (1960) hypothesized that the Greenspoon and Foreman findings could not be replicated and they did in fact obtain null results. However, Dyal (1965) has recently replicated the Greenspoon and Foreman results for the case of a 30 sec. delay interval. The purpose of the present experiment is twofold: (a) to provide replication of Green-spoon and Foreman's study at the 20 sec. delay interval used by Bilodeau and Ryan, and (b) to determine the effect of elimination of KR on a simple motor response which has been formed on the basis of KR.