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DIURNAL VARIATIONS OF MUSCLE ACTION POTENTIALS AND WORD ASSOCIATIONS RELATED TO PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIENTATION
Author(s) -
Aarons Louis
Publication year - 1968
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1968.tb02803.x
Subject(s) - psychology , arousal , anxiety , electroencephalography , developmental psychology , association (psychology) , morning , action (physics) , orientation (vector space) , audiology , social psychology , neuroscience , psychiatry , medicine , geometry , mathematics , psychotherapist , physics , quantum mechanics
Theoretical analysis has suggested that the feedback of neuromuscular activity affects quantitative but not qualitative aspects of responses, i.e. arousal provides energy but not direction for behavior. This study was carried out to determine whether or not qualitative aspects of ideation vary with the normal diurnal fluctuations of neuromuscular activity. Word association tests revealed qualitative differences among responses before sleep, upon awakening and at noon. Some differences were related to psychological test variables of kinesthetic orientation, need for change, and anxiety; other differences were independent of psychological test scores but related to the time of the word tests and intensity of muscle action potential (EMG). Subjects with low and high scores on the psychological tests were similar in both body temperature variation and amount of time spent in different EEG sleep stages. EMG levels during sleep were highly correlated with EEG sleep stages for both groups, but low psychological test scorers exhibited more EMG activity than high scorers. Neuromuscular arousal was accompanied by qualitative changes in verbal responses that were related to psychological orientations.