Some aspects of verbal conditioning in psychiatric patients

Using a modification of a verbal conditioning technique reported by Tafiel (1955) it was found that only schizophrenics and normals showed evidence of conditioning, neurotics and depressives showing changes not differing from chance. There was greater evidence of conditioning among Ss aware of the contingency between response and reinforcement, and some tentative evidence for relationships of anxiety and extraversion with verbal conditioning.     

On the psychophysical law and estimation procedures in psychophysical scaling

A general formulation of the power law is presented which has two special features: (1) negative exponents are admissible; and (2) the log law is a special limiting case. Estimation procedures, which provide joint estimates of the exponent and the absolute threshold, are derived for the direct ratio scaling methods. A solution is provided for theaveraging problem for ratio production and bisection scaling, two methods generating observations on the physical scale, and Monte Carlo methods are used to evaluate the resulting estimators.