Earlier experimental work has attempted to account for Word Association Test response faults as being due to response entropy, thereby discounting emotional disturbance as an explanatory variable. The present study demonstrates that response entropy is a function of the emotional connotation of the stimulus word, for both college and schizophrenic Ss, and that this affective variable is more important than stimulus familiarity in determining the response variability.
ProblemResponses to the word association test have become the basis for a large number of studies of verbal behavior. Although emphasis was initially focused on the most popular responses given, investigators have subsequently found it important to describe the nature of the entire response distribution (Garskof & Houston, 1963;Horvath, 1963). Laffal made an early contribution to this problem with his paper on the relationship between response faults and response entropy. He demonstrated that the occurrence of a lengthy reaction time and/or reproduction errors were related to the number of different responses given to that stimulus word. From this finding he concluded that these response faults on a word-association test were due to the nature of the response distribution. This conclusion stood in opposition to the common clinical assumption that response faults are indicators of emotional disturbance (Jung, 1919;Rapaport, 1946). While Laffal's study pointed out the importance of