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Psychosomatic Medicine 15:8-21 (1953)
© 1953 American Psychosomatic Society

Autonomic Response Specificity

An Experimental Study

JOHN I. LACEY Ph.D.1, DOROTHY E. BATEMAN B.A.1, and RUTH VanLEHN 1

1 Fels Research Institute, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

Eighty-five male college students were subjected to four stresses in sequence. The stresses were mental arithmetic, hyperventilation, letter association, and the cold pressor test. Palmar conductance, heart rate, and variability of heart rate were simultaneously and continuously recorded. The results were analyzed in terms of autonomic tension and autonomic lability. Autonomic tension was defined as the maximum level a physiological function reaches during stress. Autonomic lability was defined as the maximum displacement a physiological function exhibits during stress.

The experiment was designed to test the hypothesis of relative response specificity, which states that for a given set of autonomic functions individuals tend to respond with a pattern of autonomic activation in which maximal activation occurs in the same physiological function, whatever the stress. This hypothesis was decisively supported.

The detailed results suggested an extension of the principle of relative response specificity. The revised hypothesis is: For a given set of autonomic functions, there exists quantitative variation among individuals in the degree to which a pattern of response is stereotyped. Some individuals are so constituted that they will respond with a given hierarchy of autonomic activation whatever the stress; others will show greater fluctuation from stress to stress, although they will exhibit one pattern more frequently than others; still other individuals randomly exhibit now one pattern, now another. In addition, although the rank order of reactivity remains the same from stress to stress, the quantitative difference between the degree of activation of the different physiological functions will fluctuate markedly.

Submitted on August 2, 1951




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