Anxiety and Arousal in Psychoneurotic Patients

Psychophysiological effects of progressive relaxation in anxiety neurotic patients and of progressive relaxation and alpha feedback in nonpatients.

“…A similar lack of significant relationships has also been found between various physiological measures and the Maudsley Neuroticism Scale (Spelman, 1966;Sloane et al, 1965), Welsh's A factor (Katkin, 1965), Mc-Reynold's Assimilation Scale (M'cReynolds, Acker, & Brackbill, 1966), and several tests of situational anxiety (Katkin, 1966;Rosenstein, 1960). A possible reason for the inadequacy of these paper-and-pencil tests as measures of anxiety is that these tests may measure other things besides anxiety, for example, the willingness of people to describe themselves negatively or to admit emotional weaknesses.…”

“…Other paper-and-pencil tests may have the same problem, especially the commonly used Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (TMAS). In some instances the TMAS has been found to be significantly related to physiological measures, such as eyeblink conditioning (Spence & Taylor, 1966), conditioning of finger withdrawal reflex (Sloane, Davidson, & Payne, 1965), the Palmar Sweat Index during a verbal conditioning task (Haywood & Spielberger, 1966), conditioned heart rate accelerations (Du'be, 1966), and basal heart rate (Lehrer, 1969). However, most studies have found no relationship between the TMAS and autonomic measures (e.g., Beam, 1955;Bitterman & Holtzman, 1952;Bursten & Russ, 1965;Calvin, McGuigan, Tyrrell, & Soyars, 1956;Lewinsohn, 1956;McGuigan, Calvin, & Richardson, 1959;Sloane et al, 1965;Spelman, 1966).…”

The Effect of Thioridazine on Autonomie Conditioning and Arousal in Normal Subjects

“…It also suggested that neurotic patients may suffer from no learning deficit as such. Under the conditions of our experiments (Sloane et al,8,9), however, neurotics developed a higher level of anxiety or arousal in response to electric shocks than did normals, and this anxiety impaired their adaptive behavior as assessed by their ability to learn to avoid shocks.…”

The interactive effect of personality, time of day, and caffeine: A test of the arousal model.

“…The first hypothesis is that individual differences in introversion/extraversion are related to differences in the resting (basal) level of cortical arousal or activation. It has been reported that compared to extraverts, introverts are more sensitive to auditory stimulation (Smith, 1968) and to pain (Haslam, 1967); have higher sedation thresholds (Sloane, Davidson, & Payne, 1965); higher levels of skin conductance (Revelle, 1974) ; and have more spontaneous galvanic skin responses (Coles, Gale, & Kline, 1971). Introverts have also been reported to be more resistant to the decrement in vigilance performance that is associated with low levels of arousal (Carr, 1971;Keister & McLaughlin, 1972;Krupski, Raskin & Bakan, 1971).…”