Drugs and Personality

Abstract

In a previous paper one of us (4) has elaborated a theory relating drug action to personality. According to this theory, depressant drugs increase cortical inhibition (Pavlov) or reactive inhibition (Hull), thus producing an extraverting effect on personality, while stimulant drugs decrease inhibition and produce an introverting effect in behaviour. It was also suggested in this paper that a direct proof of the hypothesis might be obtained by making predictions regard ing the effects of stimulant and depressant drugs on a variety of experimental laboratory situations connected with the general theory of inhibition and excitation.

Behavioral Pharmacology

“…The distribution of interresponse times of subj ects working on a DRL schedule was moved signifi cantly toward shorter interresponse times by 5 mg. of dextro-amphetamine (39). Again, 10 mg. of dextro-amphetamine given four hours before the test session have been reported to increase the total time that subjects were able to keep a stylus in contact with a metal disk rotating on a turntable (44). That the effect was smaller is perhaps not surprising since the human subjects received about 0.06 mg./ kg.…”