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PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL AND LEARNING CORRELATES OF ANXIETY AND INDUCED MUSCLE RELAXATION
Author(s) -
Wilson Alan,
Wilson Arthur S.
Publication year - 1970
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.1469-8986.1970.tb02262.x
Subject(s) - psychology , anxiety , skin conductance , heart rate , relaxation (psychology) , muscle tension , systematic desensitization , desensitization (medicine) , progressive muscle relaxation , psychophysiology , clinical psychology , audiology , neuroscience , medicine , physical medicine and rehabilitation , blood pressure , psychiatry , receptor , biomedical engineering
Recently, extensive use has been made of voluntary muscle relaxation as a response which presumably inhibits anxiety in “systematic desensitization” psychotherapies. This study attempted to test the hypothesis that muscle relaxation would reciprocally inhibit anxiety during a paired‐associate learning task. Subjects ( S s) were divided into high, medium, and low anxiety levels and muscle tension, muscle relaxation, and normal tension groups. Paired‐associate learning efficiency, as well as heart rate, skin conductance, integrated electromyogram, respiration rate, and finger temperature during learning were measured. Partial substantiation for the hypothesis was obtained for high anxiety S s, but data for other groups was inconsistent with the hypothesis. An alternative explanation was suggested. Heart rate was the physiological variable which best discriminated the groups.