EMOTIONAL INDICATORS IN WORD ASSOCIATION

Abstract

Long reaction‐times and other features of word‐association performance have been widely accepted as indicators of emotional disturbance in subjects, but the evidence for this interpretation is scant. Indeed, there is better evidence for the view that these features indicate associative difficulty of a typically non‐emotional kind. Separate analyses of the responses to thirty neutral and thirty emotional words made by 100 subjects confirmed the importance of associative difficulty in eliciting ‘emotional’ indicators. However, the emotionality of the stimulus also had this power to elicit indicators. Further, certain pairs of emotional indicators tended to co‐occur when the stimulus was emotional to an extent which was not found with neutral stimuli. The possibility of selecting emotional stimuli for particular subjects by reference to these critical pairs of indicators is discussed, but their infrequency presents something of an obstacle.