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The electrodermal response: biofeedback and individual difference studies
Author(s) -
CRIDER ANDREW
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
applied psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.497
H-Index - 88
eISSN - 1464-0597
pISSN - 0269-994X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1464-0597.1978.tb01397.x
Subject(s) - psychology , biofeedback , generalization , cognitive psychology , consciousness , cognitive science , variety (cybernetics) , documentation , neuroscience , social psychology , epistemology , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , psychiatry , programming language
Biofeedback is often regarded as a discrete discovery emerging de novo in the mid‐1960s from the work of a small number of intrepid investigators and then rapidly diffusing into public and scientific consciousness. Yet this view more likely reflects the journalistic exploitation of an admittedly dramatic development than the true state of affairs. Future historians will undoubtedly describe the biofeedback movement as a predictable outcome of a Zeitgeist formed by a variety of theoretical and technical developments extending many years backward in time. For example, biofeedback research would have been unthinkable without the prior development from EEG technology of stable, high‐gain amplifiers and associated sensors, packaged into commercially available polygraphs, for the simultaneous recording of multiple physiological events in the intact human subject. Nor is it likely that American psychologists would have attempted early biofeedback studies without the intellectual goading of prior developments in learning theory, especially the so‐called two‐factor theory of learning. This generalization, which had acquired the status of doctrine, held that visceral responses were modifiable only under Pavlovian conditioning regimes and skeletal responses only by instrumental conditioning methods (for example, Kimble, 1961). The virtual absence of supporting documentation was a clear invitation to apply feedback and reward techniques to by‐then easily recordable visceral activity. As a minor contribution to this history, I would like to indicate how early studies of the instrumental modification of electrodermal activity by my colleagues and me depended greatly on a prior distinction made by Lacey and Lacey (1958) between elicited and emitted electrodermal responses. Following a brief review of the logic of these instrumental conditioning studies and their significance for the broader biofeedback movement, I will discuss recent research on the related problem of the correlates of individual differences in electrodermal activity, an issue which also stems from the seminal work of Lacey and Lacey (1958).