The psychometric pattern: I. Anxiety neurosis

The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior.

“…If the disintegrated performance of emotional subjects on serial tasks were due to a reduced range of cue utilization as supposed, then that effect should be directly demonstrable with this measure. Indeed, low scores in tests of "immediate memory" span by anxious subjects have been reported when anxiety was determined by questionnaire (Lucas, 1952), induced by social (Lucas, 1952;Moldawsky & Moldawsky, 1952) or surgical threat (Wright, 1954), or chronic as neurosis (Clarke, 1955;Cohen, 1952;Lewinski, 1945). Such findings are sufficiently consistent to be regarded as pathonomic of anxiety (Hanfman, 1950;Payne, in press).…”

“…The symptoms of disintegration on serial tasks have been reported to be more frequent in the performances of anxious subjects than control subjects in a number of other tasks that can be regarded as belonging to the "most demanding" category. These are: serial coding (Cohen, 1952;Katchmar, Ross, & Andrews, 1958;Lewinski, 1945;Payne, in press), paced problem solving (Easterbrook, 1953;Kelly, 1932), visible maze tracing (Foulds, 1951;Karpeles, 1932;Porteus, 1956), tracking with preview (Clarke, 1955;Himmelweit, 1947), mirror drawing (Beier, 1951;Wechsler & Hartogs, 1954;Wright, 1954), syntactic speech (Kelly, 1932;Luria, 1932), and, of course, the Luria association-motor task (Clarke, 1955;Luria, 1932). Since these effects could be produced by reduced receptor-effector spans, it may be that they too reflect the reduction in range of cue utilization that is expected with emotion.…”

Digit span: An indicant of trait or state anxiety?

“…Three studies have reported no relationship between DS performance and Atrait measures (Jackson & Bloomberg, 19S8;Matarazzo, 1955;Walker & Spence, 1964), one study found a positive relationship (Jurjevich, 1963), and one reported a negative relationship (Calvin, Koons, Bingham, & Fink, 1955). The results have also been equivocal in studies in which clinical diagnosis was used as the criterion of A-trait (Lewinski, 1945;Merril & Heathers, 1952;Warner, 1950).…”

Relationship between digit span and anxiety.

“…Various investigators (Heyer, 1949;Lewinski, 1945;Rashkis & Welsh, 1946;Warner, 1950) using neuropsychiatric patients diagnosed as "anxious" have used different techniques in attempting to uncover a psychometric pattern in the W-B that would be diagnostic of anxiety. In all of their studies DS was rejected as an anxiety indicator.…”