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Choice Reaction Time of Chronic and Acute Psychiatric Patients under Primary or Secondary Aversive Stimulation
Author(s) -
KARRAS ATHAN
Publication year - 1968
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1968.tb00569.x
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulation , audiology , extinction (optical mineralogy) , psychiatry , medicine , chemistry , neuroscience , mineralogy
Three problems were studied using a two‐choice visual jump reaction time (RT) task: ( a ) chronic v . acute psychiatric Ss , ( b ) RT reduction and its extinction as a function of aversive noise or social censure, ( c ) whether noise onset or offset causes RT reduction. For the main study each sex within each diagnosis had five independent treatments after a common practice session, four of which were analysed factorially: ( a ) Immediate Escape from noise (IE), ( b ) Delayed Escape (DE), ( c ) Social Motivation (SM), or ( d ) Social Control (SC). Each treatment had 65 per cent noise or censure trials and was followed by extinction trials like the practice session. It was found that ( a ) chronics were always slower than acutes, but improved as much, ( b ) noise reduced RT as much as social censure, ( c ) reduction depended on sound offset, ( d ) SM acutes extinguished more slowly than the other groups, and SM acute males more slowly than SM acute females, ( e ) SM chronics extinguished as rapidly as IE chronics. Extra control groups confirmed all but one of the findings, namely, that SM acute males extinguished more slowly than females.