No abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to test Wolpe's prediction that autonomic sexual and anxiety arousal states are mutually inhibitory. Using a new physiological measure of female sexual arousal (vaginal blood volume), changes were compared during erotic video stimulation following anxiety and control stimulus preexposure and during anxiety and control stimulation following erotic stimulus preexposure. Consistent with reciprocal inhibition theory, when women were sexually aroused by erotic preexposure, anxiety arousal inhibited sexual arousal more rapidly than did an attention control stimulus. However, contrary to reciprocal inhibition theory, women became more rapidly aroused sexually following anxiety preexposure than following neutral preexposure. In the case of heart rate, changes were compared during erotic and neutral stimulation following anxiety preexposure and during anxiety arousal following erotic and neutral preexposure. Consistent with the literature to date, there were no heart rate changes that could be attributed to differential preexposure. Taken together, the results do not support Wolpe's reciprocal inhibition theory but do suggest a context interpretation: The way in which sexual and anxiety arousal states interact with each other may depend on the context in which subjects perceive the stimuli that generate these respective arousal states. The clinical implications of the findings were discussed.To provide the context for the experiment to be described, let us briefly review Wolpe's original definition of reciprocal inhibition and his use of the construct in clinical applications. Wolpe (1958) defined reciprocal inhibition as follows:If a response antagonistic to anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxiety-provoking cues

The structural patterns of sexual arousal are examined for eight male and eight female heterosexuals. Comparisons are made in terms of physiological and subjective arousal. The results indicate (1) that males and females differ in both the direction and magnitude of their arousal response to a variety of erotic stimuli and (2) that there is a stronger correspondence between subjective and physiological measures of sexual arousal for males than for females. A social acceptability and/or unacceptability theory is suggested to account for similarities and differences between the male and female structural patterns of arousal. Several methods of assessing subjective arousal are included to represent those most frequently used in clinical research settings. It is demonstrated that each of the subjective measures discriminates between erotic conditions and that the information provided by each of the measures are comparable.

Prior research with token reinforcement in the psychiatric population has been directed at work adjustment, more than at major symptomatic behaviors. The purpose of the present research, on the other hand, was to investigate the effects of feedback and token reinforcement on the modification of delusional verbal behavior in chronic psychotics. Six male and four female paranoid schizophrenic patients participated in the study. The results indicated that the effects of feedback were effective about half the time in reducing percentage delusional talk, but in at least three cases produced adverse reactions. Token reinforcement, however, showed more consistency and reduced the percentage of delusional verbal behavior in seven of the nine subjects exposed to this procedure. The effects of both feedback and token reinforcement were quite specific to the environment in which they were applied and showed little generalization to other situations. It would appear that using token reinforcement can reduce the percentage delusional speech of chronic paranoid schizophrenics.