Investigations of the reinstatement of extinguished fear

In two experiments, fear was conditioned to the situational cues in one compartment of a hurdle-jumping apparatus and was then extinguished. Subsequently, either one shock (Experiment 1) or three or nine shocks (Experiment 2) were given in a situation distinctively different from that in which conditioning and extinction had taken place. Although some associative strength between the situational cues and fear was shown to have remained after extinction, in neither experiment did the postextinction-shock treatment increase the fear elicited by these cues: Escape-from-fear performance was no better in the shocked groups than in control groups given no additional shock. Thus, the nonassociative hypothesis which postulates that inflating the value of the representation of the UCS with shock-alone presentations can reinstate the extinguished fear of a stimulus was not supported. Rather, the results showed that, after extinction, an increase in fear of a simulus depended on further conditioning to that stimulus. The data also indicated that the nonvisual components of the situational cues predominated over the visual component.     

On phi-phenomena

The meaning of "phi" in Max Wertheimer 's 1912 article on seen movement (the publication of which marks the beginning of Gestalt psychology) and the import of the article itself were topics of a report in this Journal. The claims made in that report are questioned here, and a different interpretation of phi and the original article is offered.     

William Healy (1869-1963): pioneer child psychiatrist and criminologist

William Healy, M.D., a pioneer psychiatrist and criminologist, established the first child guidance clinic in the United States in 1909, and was an early advocate of both the "team approach" and the "child's own story" in treatment and research. One of the founders and the first president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Healy helped introduce Freudian thought into the United States. Among his contributions to the field of criminology are his book The Individual Delinquent (1915) and his "multifactor theory" of delinquency, which broadened the field and moved it away from European criminology's stress on genetic factors. Healy developed an elaborate methodology for the complete study of the offender by a variety of specialists. He was also a reformer in the field of corrections, based on his investigations of several institutions for delinquents.