Conditioning of hostile and neutral verbs in neurotics and normals.

Personality Dynamics1

“…Simkins (183) compared verbal ("good") and nonverbal (pennies and points) reinforcements of (hostile) statements, but he tried also to manipulate Sst feelings about the experiment by criticizing, complimenting, or neutrally discussing their performance on fake aptitude tests before it began. Use of hostile verbs increased significantly when reinforced with "pennies and points" regardless of E's earlier behavior, but verbal reinforcement only elicited increases in hostile verbs in complex interaction with earlier E remarks and with sex of S. Southwell (189), however, found that use of hostile verbs increased more after verbal than nonverbal reinforcement, but the reinforcing properties of the latter (E writing down S's words) are quite ambiguous. Of greater interest is his discovery that neurotics show lower base rates in the use of hostile verbs than do normals; they also learn hostile verbs more slowly than neutral ones, while normals do just the opposite.…”

Counselor's understanding of student's communication as a function of the counselor's perceptual defense.

“…Generally, work on perceptual defense has been carried on as laboratory research (Dodrill, 1964;Eriksen, 1954;Krause, 1961;Kurland, 1954;Lowenfeld, 1961), but little has been done in a nonlaboratory counseling context. Research which has been completed in a counseling setting has focused primarily on the anxiety of the client (Garfield & Afflect, 1961;London, 1964;Pascal & Salzberg, 1959;Sarason & Campbell, 1962;Sipprelle, 1967;Southwell, 1962;Wolpe, 1958) rather than on the counselor's anxiety, although Lawton (1958), Bandura (1956), and Russell and Snyder (1963) have studied the anxiety of the counselor.…”