Observations on the Unreliability of Subjective Reports of Emotional Reactions

Abstract

THE following observations were made on the group of normal individuals (64 medical students) who underwent the psychogalvanic experiments reported in a preceding paperl. We there have described the stimuli used and the experimental procedure (no external current, string galvanometer, records on rolling film paper). Though these experiments were not unde&ak& primarily in order to find out those topics which were of especial importance for the individuals under test, we examined the records for this also. The students were asked after the test 00 give a subjective account of their experience during the experiment. The word list was presented to each of them and the request was made t o mark all those words which had elicited, during the experiment, a definite emotional reaction. The results of the experiments also were discussed with many of the subjects after the records were developed and the reactions identitied.The question may arise whether a galvanic response always corresponds to what we call an emotion. There are findings in patients which suggest that the galvanic skin reflex-in some pathological cases a t least-may function independently of higher functions of the personality, though from all the work which has been done on the psychogalvanic phenomenon it is evident that, as a rule, a deflection of the string is based on an affective swing. Our experiments corroborate this.The list of 50 stimulus words which contained terms indicative of a variety of actual life situations was read twice during the experiment (with a few minutes' interval); the subjects were asked to make no response. In the accompanying table we give the stimulus words arranged according to the frequency of the reactions during the first reading. Following each word is indicated the number of individuals (as percentage of the group of 50 students here considered) who gave This Journal. XVII, pp. 6449.

Mere ownership: Affective self‐bias or evaluative conditioning?

“…by Joubert (1991). That the own name can evoke a vivid 'psycho galvanic skin response' [quite independent of verbally reported emotion] was already discovered by Syz in 1926). The physical properties of these salient stimuli, their marked affective appeal and their temporal and spatial contingency with the conditioned stimuli are considered to be crucial.…”

Habituatory response decrement in the intact organism.

“…Habituation of the GSR in medical students to words alone was shown by Syz (109) to proceed with many of the characteristics of less complicated situations. The percentages of students reacting to single words of high emotional content ranged from 16 to 84%; during a second repetition of the word list, this range dropped from the original to from 4 to 68%, the average percentage loss for all words being 16.3.…”

How to Administer the Initial Preference Task

“…However, this field of research is certainly not new—it has already begun more than a century ago with Hall (1898) noting the importance of our names to our sense of self as early as 1891. Syz (1926) found that the own name can evoke a vivid ‘psycho galvanic skin response’ that is independent of verbally reported emotions. The origin of this attachment of self to one's own name is probably grounded in childhood (Guardo & Bohan, 1971) and keeps on through our whole lives (Stieger & LeBel, in press).…”