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Attentiveness and awareness as a variable in psychopathology and therapy: The relationship between neurosis, anxiety and the ability to attend

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Attentiveness and awareness as a variable in psychopathology and therapy: The relationship between neurosis, anxiety and the ability to attend

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Content ATTENTIVENESS AND AWARENESS AS A VARIABLE IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND THERAPY: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEUROSIS, ANXIETY AND THE ABILITY TO ATTEND by Esther Benton A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA . In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Education) May 1982 UMI Number: DP24815 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertatie n Publ sh*ng UMI DP24815 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K L O S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, w ritte n by Esther Benton under the direction of A.er. . Dissertation C om mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y Dean D a te -April2:fcf ^ig8J2 MMITTEE TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES.........................................-*v LIST OF FIGURES......................................... .vi Chapter I THE PROBLEM AND ITS RELEVANCE................1 Introduction...................................1 Relevant Theories............................. 6 Interference Theory...^................... .6 Selective Attention........ 7 Perceptual Defense . ...........9 Purpose of the Study.......... 12 Importance of the Study ...............12 Research Question............................ 13 Research Hypotheses..........................13 Hypothesis 1................... 13 Subhypothesis 1............................ 13 Hypothesis 2................................14 Method................ 14 Subjects........ 14 Instruments.. . ........... 14 Apparatus................. 14 The Stimuli............... 15 Procedure........... 15 Statistical Analysis...... 17 Assumptions........... 17 Definitions...................................19 The General Meaning of Anxiety............19 The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and-Anxiety............22 Plan of the Work............................. 24 II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE.................... 2 6 The Beginnings: The Background. in Psychoanalysis..........................26 Rapaport's Theory of Attention Cathexis ............. 35 Chapter Page The Current Status of Psycho analytic Concepts.......................37 The Idea of the Unconscious...............41 Perceptual Defense: The Background for Intentionality.........................45 Set Expectancy. .........................58 Response Probability.......................65 Part-Cue Response Characteristic Hypothesis...................... 66 The Concept of Intentionality...............71 Introductory and Basic Suppositions......72 Consciousness and Intentionality......... 78 Being-in-the-WofId: The Basic Principle.... 81 The Object is Different (Things Change).... 83 Intersub jectivity . . . 91 Retroflexion: The Science of Loneliness.............................. 92 The Existential Correction...... ...95 The Intentional Existence of Our Lives (Reflective and Prereflective Modes)................. 98 Conclusion: The Personal Myth............102 Summary and an Attempt at Integration.....110 III METHODOLOGY AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN....... 114 Purpose of the Study.................. 114 Importance of the Study.................... 114 Research Questions..........................115 Research Hypotheses.........................115 Hypothesis 1.............................. 115 Subhypothesis 1........................... 115 Hypothesis 2..............................116 Method....................................... 116 Subjects.......................... 116 Instruments................................116 Apparatus ................... 116 The Stimuli...... 117 Procedure........................ 117 Statistical Analysis........................119 Assumptions..................................119 IV RESULTS.......................................122 iii Chapter Page V DISCUSSION......................... 130 The Findings...................... ....130 Anxiety as a Measure and as a Concept.....133 In Terms of Philosophy..and Theory.........138 REFERENCES............................................... 141 iv LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1 Linear Correlation (Pearson r)............. 123 2 Curvilinear Analysis (eta squared).........123 3 Analysis of Covariance (TAT by NT, with sex)....................................124 4 Eta Analysis - Men Only.....................125 5 Eta Analysis - Women Only...................125 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 Anxiety Triad........ 127 2 Neurotic Triad.................. 128 vi CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM AND ITS RELEVANCE Introduction: "Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation" (Fowles, 1977, p. 3). Psychiatry and clinical psychology have long considered attentional defects as important elements in mental disorder, most particularly in schizo phrenia. It was the contention, in terms of this work, that the problem of attention, and the ability to attend in a focused or relevant manner, is a more generalized and central issue in general psychopathology, and that the neurotic person intends to either "veil," "fuzz out" (that is, to put a soft focus on reality), or to select certain aspects of reality for partial super focus and/or to put everything in excruciating undifferentiated focus^-a focus where most things become unmanageable and fraught with difficulty. Humanistic Existentialist thought places great emphasis on the issue of "self deception" jSartre, 1956; Ofman, 1976, 1981) and its opposite, "explicit awareness" or attending (Ofman, 1976; Fingarette, 1972; Murphy, 1 2 1975). In speaking of self-deception or violation, Ofman (1976) wrote, "The situation in effect teaches the person the value of ambiguity, distraction, and self-oblivious- ness" (p. 69) . Erwin Singer (1965), in one of the most important and penetrating books on psychotherapy, pointed out that the major issue in psychotherapy is the person's lack of awareness and avoidance of self -knowledge t Psychopathology represents man's attempts to avoid the knowledge of his finiteness, his helplessness, and his dependence upon the world around him. They further propose that psy chopathology is failure to confront those forces which interfere with self- actualization, whether biological or social. Mental illness is seen as a refusal to acknowledge one's reaction in the face of such restricting and limiting circumstances. These latter theorists see man horrified by his awareness that fulfillment is so difficult and so limited. (Singer, 1965, p. 25-26) For good interpersonal reasons, a person initially chooses not to be aware and then continues to practice and build an unaware, un-spelled=out, inexplicit lifestyle. This has a very close analogy in linguistic activity. In choosing an authentic life, one has to have the courage to make explicit, to utter clearly and in a fully articulated way, what he wants (who he is), specifically and generally in life and in a particular situation. I believe that the essence of reality is specificity; this, after all, is central to most psychotherapy and counseling, for the person is invited to talk, to explore himself deeply. In our terms, 3 exploring oneself deeply (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967; Carkhuff & Berenson, 1967; Carkhuff, 1969) means a conscious effort to spell out those specific features of a person’s being in the world that have heretofore not been spelled out. This spelling out estab lishes the crucial connection between one’s wants in an overall sense and the outcomes of those wants and choices in a particular situation as the person lives that situation. (Ofman, 1976, P. 70) Attention, paying attention, close, explicit attention, and spelling out of one's world is an often stated goal of psychotherapy and a variable in psycho pathology. On the other hand, denial defense, and sup pression are seen to be variables which are closely con nected with the psychopathological process (Fenichel, 1945; Klein, 1966; Brenner, 1966). Theorists and researchers alike allude to various ways or mechanisms in which attention or awareness is impaired, misdirected, defended against, limited by inclusion or exclusion, avoided against ("tunnel vision"), and denied. All these mechanisms are seen as defenses against cues and stimuli in the environment which are anxiety-arousing to the person. Dollard and Miller (1950), for example, in an attempt to translate psychoanalytic theory in behavioristic terms, wrote of repression as a mechanism by which threat ening stimuli are denied, and thus are "unseen" (unattended to?) as. they appear in the environment. Furthermore, via generalization, stimuli which are similar to or close to the repressed event are also unattended to* Repression, thus, is a selective Calbeit unconscious) mechanism which "bleeds over" (via generalization) to various grades of threatening stimuli in the environment. Asking the person to free associate, wrote Dollard and Miller (1950), in the face of a non-aversive audience, helps to--in a graded fashion--extinguish the distal elements of the repressed act until the central repressed act is able to be attended to. Skinner (1953) wrote in a similar vein: The commonest current technique of psychotherapy is due to Sigmund Freud. . . . So far as we are con cerned here, it may be described simply in this way: the therapist establishes himself as a nonpunishing audience. . . . As the therapist gradually establishes himself as a nonpunishing audience, behavior which has hitherto been repressed begins to appear in the repertoire of the patient. . . . [Thus] stimuli which are automatically generated by the patient’s own behavior become less and less adversive and less and less likely to generate emotional reactions. The patient feels less wrong, less guilty, or less sinful. As a direct consequence he is less likely to exhibit the various forms of operant behavior which, as we have seen, provide escape from such self generated stimulation. (pp. 370-371) 5 To penumbrate the rest of this work, it might be stated that the interest here was in the manner in which attentiveness "works" in persons who are more or less identified as "neurotic" (as defined by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) and thus, more or less anxious. The "hunch," born of work in doing psychotherapy and counseling, was that persons who were neurotic and anxious responded to (attended to) stimuli and events in their environment differentially, perhaps in a curvilinear fashion. It was noted by the writer that highly anxious or neurotic persons tended to assume one of two positions: some assumed a heightened or "sensitized" view of their environment--they were hypervigilant; or others appeared to assume a repressive, blocking, or "softening of focus" position towards their inner and outer environments. It was noticed that some "bound" their anxiety by being very, perhaps overly attentive to actual stimuli in their environment (compulsively attentive--"if I pay very close attention to everything, I will not be surprised and perhaps overwhelmed by feeling or anxiety"). On the other hand, a second "population" was noted. A number of people tended to ward off anxiety by blurring reality, by assuming a non-attentive stance towards the world. The basic intention in these persons may be stated as follows: 6 nTo look la to see, therefore X will not look 'closely lest I see that which threatens me and thus not have to confront a painful reality. go X shall play * ostrich1 and be safe." Relevant Theories Some framework theories which bear upon the above shall now be briefly outlined. Interference Theory Research on "attention dysfunction" has evolved mainly from the testing of various cognitive theories of schizophrenia, the most comprehensive of which is Inter ference Theory (Shakow, 19 62; Silverman, 196 4a, 196 4b; Buss, 19 66). This approach suggests that the schizophrenic lacks an efficient "filter mechanism" and consequently fails to inhibit attendant stimulation, both internal and external, which is irrelevant to the task at hand. Thus, overinclusive or overexclusive thinking and perception results. Generally, this fundamental defect in schizo phrenia is seen as an inability to select, attend to, and regulate the stimuli that impinge on the person. This breakdown in what is frequently conceptualized as "information processing" is assumed to underlie the major category of symptoms subsumed under the psychopathic process ('Buss, 1966; Easterbrook & Costello, 19.70; McGhie & Chapman, 1961; Payne, 1970). 7 More recent studies (e.g., Freedman & Chapman, 197 3) have found that the type of attentional disturbance observed in hospitalized patients by McGhie and Chapman (19 61) are somewhat more common among, but not peculiar to, schizophrenic patients. Tucker, Harrow, Detre, and Hoffman (1969), finding that self-reported attentional disturbances were significantly correlated with high trait anxiety and neuroticism scores, proposed that faulty selective attention was caused by chronic anxiety and occurred in other forms of psychiatric illness besides schizophrenia. Very little research has been done, however, to determine whether comparable attentional differences occur in other forms of pathology and/or in normal populations. The precise relationship between certain personality variables (e.g., anxiety) and the ability to attend, is still unclear; the exploration of that relationship was one of the goals of this study. Selective Attention In addition to the above-mentioned Interference Theory, a number of investigators address these attentional issues from a somewhat different point of reference. A vast body of research literature exists, for example, on selective attention. This body of research findings has shown convincingly that individuals do disregard irrelevant, and distracting information in the service of attending 8 to other material which they deem more relevant or impor tant (cf. Norman, 1968, 1969; Neisser, 1967; Egeth, 1967, for comprehensive reviews of experimental findings). There are a number of theories which have attempted to account for the selective attention phenomenon CBroadbent, 19 58; Greenwald, 1972; Mackintosh, 1975; Neisser, 1967; Treisman, 1964, 1969). As such, they are elegant and parsimonious models of how the phenomenon "works" (due to the action of a filtering mechanism or because of attenuation due to successive stages of process ing). They have, however, been found lacking because of serious flaws and omissions; namely, they constitute detailed descriptions of the process without attempts at explanations. They do not consider what it is that correlates with, differences in level of performance on selective attention tasks. The question: Why is it that some individuals are more successful than others (make fewer intrusion errors) in attentiveness remains unan swered. The answer to this question does not lie in the knowledge that across subjects certain types of material are easier to attend to, or that information sometimes gets processed into echoic storage or buffer zones. What is needed is. a consideration of individual differences in performance with, type of material held constant. 9 The individual differences herein referred to have to do with a basic concept in Humanistic Existential psychology: intentionality. It is suggested that persons either attend or do not attend to various aspects of their imminent reality as a function of their commitment to "seeing reality" in accordance with their idiosyncratic view and projects (Ofman, 1976; Sartre, 1972, 1956) and their attempts to salvage their commitments from "corrective" or cybernetic influences. The "neurotic paradox" is a perfect example of this process. As con ceptualized by Mowrer (19 48), it is "the absolutely central problem in neurosis and therapy." This paradox refers to "the unwillingness to give up or modify faulty thoughts or behaviors in the face of corrective evidence" (Raimy, 19 75, p. 12). Many theories have been advanced to explain this behavior, but all seem to have in common the individual's avoidance of thoughts, ideas, situations, or information which might correct the belief or misconception. That is, the subject engages in selective attention in order to maintain a basic position or way of being in the world. Perceptual Defense Another body of research which bears on the issues of individual differences and attention is that of Perceptual Defense Theory postulated by Bruner and Postman (194 7), Kempler and Wiener (19 63), Klein (19 70), Wolitzky 10 and Wachtel ( ’ 19 731 , and more recently by Murphy (19 75) , Bergin (1963) , Leighton and Hughes (19 61) , Fischer (.1970), Enright (1970) , Needleman ( ’ 1967) , and Mahrer C197 8) . This research, has sought to probe the perceiver's selective strategy toward emotional stimuli with a focal interest in the selectivity and organization of perceptions as a function of needs, expectancies, priorities, values, and psychodynamic defensive structures. A large number of these studies have used the recognition threshold paradigm as a means of measuring differential responses. Differ ences in recognition thresholds are accounted for by the positing of special perceptual processes (e.g., "subception”) which are the loci of the personality's contribution and are assumed to affect the final percep tion by regulating or selecting what is to be admitted into awareness. Perceptual Defense theorists posited not only inhibitory reactions to emotional inputs" but vigilance or enhancement effects as well. Perceptual vigilance refers to a relative lowering of recognition thresholds to emotional stimuli, while perceptual defense refers to a relative elevation of those thresholds. The general idea behind studies of this, type is that a clinically sophis- “ ticated conception of "defense" must allow for differences, in personalities and, consequently, for different modes or 11 styles of reaction to emotional inputs, i.e., inhibition (suppression or repression) as well as vigilance (sensitization). Some researchers have gone beyond this point, proposing a general curvilinear relationship between sensitivity to input and extent of input emotion ality (Brown, 1961). It is just this curvilinear relation ship which was of interest in this work. The term "perceptual defense," thus, is frequently used as a general rubric subsuming both elevation as well as inhibition of sensitivity to stimuli as a function of the person's emotional investment or "cathexes" (Healy, Bronner, & Bowers, 1930). In attempting to integrate the perceptual defense data into a general understanding of human attention, however, a problem becomes immediately apparent. While perceptual defense data has revealed differential response performance, it is of limited utility because it is impossible to determine whether the different recognition thresholds are due to attentional style or to the different effects of the emotionally^-laden stimuli themselves. The basis upon which the person responds remains unclear. That which is needed, then, is a measure of attentional style to neutra1 stimuli in order to tease out the relationship between personality characteristics (i.e., anxiety or neuroticisml and the willingness or ability to 12 attend. In addition, the criticism directed toward selective attention theories (above) applies here as well. It is again description without explanation. The Humanistic Existentialist notion of intentionality (Ofman, 1976, 1980, 1981; Van den Berg, 1972) might hold just such explanatory power. Purpose of the Study The purpose of the study was to frame hypotheses and generate data which would assist in the determination of the relationship between anxiety and neuroticism and the ability to attend to neutral stimuli. The intention is to "tease out" the personality variable alone, if any such exist, without contamination of the stimulus variable. importance of the Study In its central concern with the issue of the person’s ability to attend (as a function of personality characteristics), this study probed a significant dimen sion in general psychopathology and attempted to construct a functional relationship with concepts in Humanistic and Humanistic Existential psychology where the concept of "explicit awareness;" is; central. As such, the results of this study shed new and significant, albeit surprising, light on both the above-mentioned areas. 13 Research Question The central research question was as follows: What is the functional relationship between neurosis/anxiety as measured by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) (Hathaway & McKinley, 194 0, 19 51) and the per formance on a test of ability to attend to neutral stimuli (nonsense syllables), as determined by tachistoscopically presented stimuli? Research Hypotheses Hypothesis 1 The relationship between neurosis/anxiety (as measured by the MMPI) and the ability to attend (as determined by a tachistoscopically administered test of attention) is a curvilinear one. That is, high scoring subjects on neuroticism/anxiety fall on either extreme on measures of attention. Subhypothesis 1 The basic neurotic process results in one of two positions: la. A super-attentive (hypervigilant) "looking and listening" attitude, named here as "Type I awareness." lb. A non-attentive (hypovigilant) "ostrich effect" (repressive) attitude, named here as "Type II awareness." 14 Hypothesis 2 There are two distinct MMPI profiles: One asso ciated with Type I awareness, and another associated with Type II awareness. Method Subjects The subjects were 101 students (32 males, 69 females) from introductory counseling classes at the University of Southern California. Instruments The measuring instrument used in the study was the MMPI. The MMPI is generally accepted in the psychological literature as being the best available and most efficient of the multi-scale tests of personality functioning (Buros, 197 2; Korchin, 197 6). It also has the additional advan tage of being amenable to group administration. Though the validity and reliability of the MMPI shows mixed results, it is nevertheless one of the most highly respected and widely used personality tests in psychology (Korchin, 1976; Cronbach, 1960; Sundberg & Tyler, 1962). Apparatus, A standard model tachistoscope (Model no. 12321A) was unavailable from the Psychological Corporation, but a 15 comparable model was modified and constructed from a Kodak Carousel with a specifically designed shutter mechanism which was adjustable as to time of presentation. It should be noted that trial runs were accomplished for threshold visual acuity (symbols were recognized 50% of the time). The speed was approximately 1/400th of a second. The Stimuli The stimuli consisted of 35 black-and-white transparencies, one for each set of nonsense syllables. The nonsense syllables were CVC's randomly selected from the list prepared by Hilgard (Stevens, 1951) and of low to zero association value. Procedure The subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One underwent tachistoscopic presentation first, followed by administration of the MMPI. The second group had the order reversed. Both testing procedures were administered to the two groups as a whole. While one group was taking the MMPI, the other group was performing the attention task, in a different room. The counterbalancing was done in order to balance out any order-effects. Both procedures were administered during regularly scheduled laboratory time. 16 In order to achieve a more accurate measure of performance on the attention task and to avoid problems with individual presentation, various precautions were taken. Before testing began, group threshold was determined. The criteria used for the determination of the threshold was that level of presentation resulting in 50% of subjects able to correctly perceive 50% of the stimuli. The subjects used for the determination of threshold were drawn from other comparable classes. In order to control for an additional problem inherent in group testing pro cedures, the tachlstoscopic presentation was conducted in two parts. The room in which the attention task was administered was divided into quadrants: 1 \ 2 tT 3 N* 4 At an intermission, those subjects seated in quad rant 1 were instructed to move to quadrant 4, and those in 2 to quadrant 3. Quadrants, in the room were sectioned off by means, of twine. The intent here was to control for extraneous effects such as visual angle and distortion. 17 Statistical Analysis The study was correlational. Therefore, the hypoth eses were tested by means of the various statistical pro cedures available which are based on the correlation coefficient. Hypothesis 1, that there is a curvilinear relation ship between neurosis/anxiety and performance on a measure of attention, was tested by means of the Correlation Ration: Eta Squared--a measure of nonlinear correlation (Hays, 1973). Hypothesis 2 states that the curve will be such that subjects who score high on the anxiety measure (ANX) and on the Neurotic Triad (NT) will fall on the extremes of the hypothesized U-shaped curve, which is descriptive of our attention variable. The subjects will score either high or low on the attention measure. Assumptions 1. The subjects have approximately the same base- rates. on the MMPI as the population upon which the MMPI was. normalized. 2. The test of attention performance is an adequate and generalizeable measure of a person's capacity for and method of attending. 3. The assumptions, underlying the use of the two correlation methods are not violated. There was no reason 18 to believe that this, assumption was not met (Hays, 1973) since "The analyses of variance and the correlation-ratio J[etaJ approach are equivalent procedures and lead to the same result" (Ferguson, 1976, p. 237). It is appropriate to comment upon these assumptions in order to justify the statistics used. The distribution of the dependent variable in the population from which the sample was drawn was normal. Since the sample constituted a "large" sample (>30) one may assume it was normal. At any rate, for large samples such as N = 101, there is no reason to suspect a departure from normality. Regarding homogeneity of variance, since moderate departures from homogeneity do not seriously affect the inferences from data, no transformations nor tests for this were performed. Again, the size of the sample mitigated the need for this procedure. In regard to additive nature of effects vs. multi plicative, there is no reason to suspect that the effects of the factors on the total variation are not additive in nature. Thus., it may be stated that the statistics used in this work were quite appropriate to the analysis, of the data gained in the experimental procedure. 19 4. The employment of group versus individual admin-' istration of the attention test did not seriously affect the results. Definitions The General Meaning of Anxiety In this section, the investigator relied heavily on the significant work on anxiety which Rollo May set forth in his book, The Meaning of Anxiety (1977). It is agreed by workers in the field of personality that anxiety is a diffuse apprehension, and that the central difference between fear and anxiety is that the fear is a reaction to a specific danger while anxiety is unspecific, vague and objectless. The special character istics of anxiety are the feelings of uncertainty and helplessness in the face of perceived danger. It is important that the word "perceived" is included in this definition; obviously that which is dangerous for one is not dangerous for another. The nature of anxiety may be best understood when the question is asked as to what it is that is threatened in the experience which produces anxiety. The perceived threat in anxiety, though not necessarily more intense than fear, attacks the person on a deeper level. 20 The threat must be to something in the "core" or "essence" of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth— all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened. (May, 19 77, p. 205) Rollo May put forth the following definition of anxiety which the investigator used as foundational to this work: "Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality" (May, 1977, p. 205). The threat may be to physical or to psychological exis tence. Or the threat may be to some other value with which the person identifies. The diffuse and undifferentiated quality of anxiety refers, according to May (197 7), to the level in the personality on which threat is experienced. An individual experiences various fears on the basis of a developed security pattern. But in anxiety it is this security pattern itself which is threatened. The relation to the organism is that which is important, and if that object can be removed either by reassurance or appropriate flight, the apprehension disappears. Anxiety, however, attacks the foundation of the personality; the individual cannot "stand outside" the threat, cannot objectify it. Thereby, one is powerless to take steps to confront it. One cannot fight what one does not know . . . . 21 The fact that anxiety is a threat to the essential, rather than to the peripheral, security of the person has led some authors like Freud and Sullivan to describe it as a "cosmic" experience. It is "cosmic" in that it invades us totally, penetrating our whole sub jective universe. . . . We cannot see it separately from ourselves, for the very perception with which we look will also be invaded by anxiety. (Emphasis supplied) (May, 1977, pp. 206-207) Anxiety, then, is objectless precisely because it attacks that basis of the person’s structure on which the perception of one's self as distinct from the world of objects occurs. In anxiety, wrote May, the person is proportionately less able to see himself in relation to stimuli and hence less able to make adequate evaluation of the stimuli. In various languages the usual expres sions, accurately enough, "One has a fear" but "One ijs anxious." Thus in severe clinical cases anxiety is experienced as a "dissolution of the self." (May, 1977, p. 20 7) Neurotic anxiety is a reaction to threat which is 1) disproportionate to the objective danger, 2) involves repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and 3) is managed by means of various forms of retrenchment of activity and awareness, such as inhibitions, the development of symptoms, and the varied neurotic defense mechanisms. Generally, it should be noted that when the 22 term anxiety is used in the scientific literature, neurotic anxiety is that which is meant. It is important to point out that a reaction is disproportionate to the objective danger only because the quality of intrapsychic conflict is involved. In exis tential terms, the reaction is never disproportionate to the subjective threat. Each of the above characteristics, perforce, involves a subjective frame of reference. "Thus the definition of neurotic anxiety can be made only when the subjective approach to the problem— i.e., based on what is going on intrapsychically within the individual — is included" (May, 1977, p. 214). The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and Anxiety According to Modlin (1956), the application of the MMPI to the concept of anxiety has proved to be the most stimulating aspect of the test. "Although the MMPI does not record anxiety per se, it implies some anxiety by measuring several abnormal defenses against it, such as hysteria and psychasthenia" (Modlin, 1956, p. 392). The groups upon which anxiety measures on this test were normalized consisted of five groups: free anxiety patients who exhibited predominantly autonomic symptoms such as palpitation, dyspnea, dizziness, hyperhydrosis, tension, and insomnia, and lacked more fixed somatization; 23 post-combat anxiety state persons who suffered tension, irritability, and autonomic instability which began during combat and which persisted to a disabling degree, for at least four months after the last combat experience; neurasthenics whose experience was predominantly one of fatigue; a group of persons with headache and with gastro intestinal fixations; and the fifth group presented pictures of neurocirculatory asthenia, pains, enuresis, alcoholism, etc. Although anxiety is generally accepted as common to all neuroses, it is an integrant of many other reactions, such as early schizophrenia, as well. It is hypothesized that compositely hypochondriasis, depression, and hysteria I the neurotic triadj , and the [formulated score; Hs plus D, plus Hy (Dahlstom, Welsh & Dahlstrom, p. 90, v. 1)], and the combined score of these three categories will here after be called the anxiety score. (Modlin, 1956, p. 393) Taft (1957) concluded in his study that the anxiety index on the MMPI "is confirmed in that it successfully distinguishes the normal from the clinical sample" (p. 249), and that it is a valid measure of general anxiety. In addition to the Neurotic Triad or Anxiety Score (they are the same), this study also used the Anxiety Index, the formula for which is: where D = depression, Pt = psychasthenia,., Hs = hysteria; and Hy = hypochondriasis. 24 It is apparent, then, that while the MMPI does not measure anxiety directly, it purports to do so indirectly. That which is important, however, is to note the underlying construct upon which anxiety is based— mainly on physio logical symptomatology, in very specialized groups. Plan of the Work The first chapter introduced the topic under investigation. The problem and its relevance were dis- . cussed. Interference Theory, Selective Attention, and the theory of Perceptual Defense were introduced. Then an outline of the purposes of the study, its importance, the research questions and the research hypotheses, the method and procedure, the assumptions ' underlying the methodology and definitions were presented. The second chapter deals with a review of the liter ature in the area. It must be underscored at this point that the literature was almost nonexistent on the specific point of interest— a lack of attentiveness or an over- attentiveness. to environmental stimuli as a function of neuroticism/anxiety. Nevertheless, there was literature available on the general field of attentiveness, defense, vigilance, which bears upon the interest of the investi gation. This interest basically revolves around the person’s unwillingness or super-willingness to see, to 25 look and to— at bottom— "know." To have/ as the novelist John Fowles called it, "whole sight" (Fowles, 1977, p. 3). This chapter also presented various approaches to the problem of attention, the Psychoanalytic view, the Perceptual, Phenomenological, Humanistic-Existential (via an essay-review on the.concept of Intentionality) view points, and the information-processing point of view. An attempt was made to integrate the various points of view. The third and fourth chapters deal with, the pro cedures and the results of the actual experiment. The fifth chapter discusses the results and their implications, summarizes the work, presents its heuristic value, and points to further research directions. CHAPTER II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me T/. clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1) ~ The Beginnings; The Background in Psychoanalysis As with most things in psychology, things began with the Freudian Paradigm, which, via its Cartesian mode, defined further thinking about the nature of persons. And this is also true of the concerns in this work because, as Haber (1974) pointed out, the origins of information- processing (perception, cognition, and attention) models in psychology can be traced back to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of motivation and personality in which energy undergoes various kinds of processing in the form of cathexes and shifts as a function of development and experience. Freud viewed the person as an energy mechanism where energies, called drives (Trieb) or instincts are inborn, and exist in the archetypal, primordial "true 26 27 reality” of the person, the id. The .id, being the store house of all energy (the ego being weak in its conception), fuels, the psychic apparatus (Singer, 1965; Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970,) . Freud wrote that underneath the organized periphery of the ego lies the core of dynamic, driving chaos of forces, which strive for discharge and nothing else, but which constantly receive new stimulations from the outer and inner environments, and are influenced by somatic factors, that determine how the perceptions are experienced (Freud, 195 3, pp. 98-136)* Further, the organization of personality proceeds from the surface to the depth. The ego is to the id as the skin is. to deeper tissues. The ego, thus, is. the mediator between the person and the outside and internal world. As such a mediator, it has to provide protection against hostile influences and threatening ideas, thoughts, and impulses;. It also has. to enforce the gaining of gratifi cation "even against a restricting outside world” (Freud, 1961a, p. 14). Central to the purpose in this investigation was the concept of suppression (the willful denial of material) and repression: The portion of the conscious, that is. bes;t known is the "repressed" — that which is unconscious because strong, 28 dynamic forces! hinder its becoming conscious. The repressed pushes toward consciousness and motility; it consists of impulses seeking outlets. In this seeking activity.it tends to produce "derivatives," that is to displace its cathexes onto associatively connected ideas that are less objectionable to the conscious ego. . . . The repressed consists, first of all, of the ideas and con ceptions connected with the aim of the warded-off, impulses which, by being warded off, have lost their connection with verbal expression. (Emphasis supplied) (Fenichel, 1945, p. 17; cf, Freud, 1953) Thus the unconscious in Freudian psychology is seen as the reservoir of repressed ideas, notions, feelings, sensations, and impulses. Furthermore, and of importance in this work, is that each repressed "thing" carries with it a generalized curve of "cathexes" which "bleeds over" to stimuli which echo the original threatening (thus repressed) event. If the word mother is charged, for instance, then words, ideas, pictures, events, and' happenings are "tainted" with repression and are affected, depending upon their proximity, psychologically, to the original repressed word or idea. As another example, if excrement is a dangerous ('punished) and thus repressed event, then all activities associated with it are "infected" with repressing forces, even to the color brown (cf., Kietzman, Spring & Zubin, 1980). On the other hand, 29 a hyper-vigilant attitude towards material may be expressed when it is necessary to "look closely" at an event. Fenichel (1945), in writing of Partial Instincts, discussed Scoptophilia as the sexualization of the sensations of looking, and made that analogous to touch eroticism. Sensory stimuli which are normally initiators of excitement and executors of forepleasure may, if too strong or repressed, later resist subordination under the genital primacy [Genital primacy occurs when the function of the genitals have become dominant over the extragenital erogenous zones, and all sexual excitations become finally genitally oriented and climactically discharged--the characteristic of a mature person (Fenichel, 1945, p. 61)]. Wherever sensations of sense organs are sexualized all the features described as characteristic for primitive perception can be observed again: activity of the perceptual organs, motility inseparably connected with perception, "incorporation" of the perceived with a resultant change of the ego along the lines of what has been perceived. Observation of a child who is looking for libidinous purposes readily shows what the accompanying features or prerequisites of pleasur able looking are: he wants to look at an object in order to "feel along with him." (Fenichel, 1945, p. 71) Fenichel further pointed out that more often than not, sadistic impulses are tied up with scoptophilia. Here the person wants to see something in order to destroy it. 3Q Often, looking itself is unconsciously thought of as substitute for destroying ("I did not destroy it; I merely looked at it"). . . . The typical obsessive idea in women that they must compulsively look at men's genitals often represents a distorted expression of the sadistic wish to destroy men's genitals. (Fenichel, 1945, p. 71) Fenichel, writing in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1937), theorized that in many scoptophilic fantasies, the fantasy of incorporating the seen object through the eye is particularly clear. He wrote that scoptophilia is the major component in .children's sexual curiosity which more often than not has the quality of an instinctual drive. Fenichel further wrote that: The knowing or wanting to know sexual facts may substitute for the observa tion of sexual facts and become a sexual aim of its own. It may become displaced and give rise to the well- known continual asking of questions which can be so annoying to grownups. It may also become sublimated into a real interest in research, or its repression may block any intellectual interest, depending upon what experi ences have become associated with this instinctive sexual curiosity. (Fenichel, 194 5, p. 72) The analyst James Strachey (also the translator of many of Freud's works), as far back as; in 1930 wrote of the many difficulties that children have with apprehending written words in terms of specific repressions of the oral 31 impulses, that oral inhibitions (reading is seen to be, among orthodox analysts as coextensive with an oral— incorporating— -activity) may be displaced onto other activities with a hidden oral significance— such as reading. Importantly, the Freudians believe that the whole issue of seeing and apprehending, "looking" and being aware, is closely connected to a cathected structure where oral (incorporating) or sadistic (biting) impulses are displaced onto the material (words, etc.) to be "incorporated" or apprehended. Freud, in a pivotal article relating to the psychogenesis of visual disturbances, made the point that psychoanalysis is a dynamic conception, which reduces mental life to the interplay of reciprocally urging and checking forces. When, it happens that a group of ideas remains in the unconscious, psycho- analysis sees in this no proof of a constitutional incapacity for synthesis, exhibiting itself through this particular dissociation, but maintains that an active antagonism of certain groups of ideas has caused the isolation of another group in the unconscious. The process which imposes such a fate upon a given group is termed by psycho-analysis by the term, . . ."repression," . . . Psycho analysis can show that such repressions play an extraordinary part in our mental life, and that they may frequently miscarry' in individual cases, and that 32 such miscarriages of repression are the primary cause of symptom formation. (Freud, 1953, PP- 107-108). Freud went on to write that visual disturbances or disturbances of attention are based on the segregation from consciousness of certain provocative ideas which are connected with seeing. He assumed that these ideas are in conflict with other ideas, and thus were repressed. How does this repression occur and why? Freud answered by essentially outlining the psychoanalytic theory of neuroses, and this outline constituted the basis for the analytic-based argument part of this investigation. Our researches have not put us in a position to give the required answer. Our attention has been drawn to the significance of the instincts in conceptual life; we have learnt [sic] that every instinct seeks to come to expression by activating those ideas which are in accordance with its aims. These instincts do not always agree with one another, and this frequently results in a conflict of interests; the contra dictions in the ideas are merely the expression of the battle between the various instincts. Of quite peculiar significance for our efforts. . .'is the undeniable opposition between the instincts which serve the purposes of sexuality. . . .and those others which' aim at the self-preservation of the individual, the ego instincts. . . . Psychology has shown us that culture is acquired essentially at the cost of the sexual component-instincts, and that these must be suppressed, restrained, transmuted, directed towards loftier goals, for civilized psychical 33 achievements to take place. . . . the neuroses derive from the manifold ways in which- these processes: of trans formation fail in regard to the sexual component instincts. (Emphasis supplied) (Freud, 1953, pp. 108-109) Freud further wrote that the ego feels threatened, menaced by the push of the sexual instincts, and it defends itself in the only way that it can— by repression. But these repressions do not work well, "but result in dangerous substitute-formations of the repressed instinct and burdensome reaction-formations in the ego. From these two classes of phenomena are formed what we term the symptoms of neurosis" (Freud, 1953, p. 109). But what of visual apprehending, reading, and attending? Freud outlines the theory as follows: the various. . . .organs are at the disposal of both sexual and ego , instincts. Sexual pleasure is not connected only with the function of the genitals; the mouth serves for kissing as well as for eating and speaking, the eyes perceive not only those modifications in the external world which are of import for the preservation of life, but also the attributes of objects by means of which these may be exalted as objects of erotic selection, their "charms" . . . . It is easy to apply this to the eye and the faculty of vision. If the sexual component-instinct which makes use of sight— the sexual "lust of the eye"--has drawn down upon itself, through its exorbitant demands, some retaliatory measure from the side of the ego-instincts, so that the ideas which represent the content of its 34 strivings are subjected to repression 'and withheld from consciousness, the general relation of the eye and the faculty of vision to the ego and to consciousness is: radically disturbed. The ego has lost control of the organ, which now becomes solely the instru ment of the repressed sexual impulse. (Freud, 1953, p. 110) And, importantly for this investigation, it can work both ways— via hypovigilance through the mechanism of reaction formation. Thus it is that if scoptophilia has been repressed, inhibitions of general attentiveness and looking come to the foreground. In extreme cases, the person turns away from looking at a thing in general, and lives by generalities and abstractions only. On the other end of things, the person may attend only to specifics, to limit attention so that no "extraneous"--and perhaps threatening impulses--material may enter consciousness. Thus the hypervigilant attitude reigns. This may be analogous to small detail (dd) responses on the Rorschach. Note the following: An emphasis on dd represents obses sional, meticulous, or pedantic trends. The hypothesis is similar to that. . . . of d: namely, that this approach is a defense against insecurity through a quest for certainty and a clinging to limited areas for fear of losing one's grip and being carried away into confusion. . , . on the other hand, a stress on de indicates a fear to go into anything too deeply, a fear of becoming involved, . . .of anxiety. (Klopfer, Ainsworth, Klopfer & Holt, 1954, pp. 307-308) 35 Rapaport * s Theory of Attention Cathexis Perhaps the most modern interpretation of the psychoanalytic findings, are represented by Rapaport in his re-thinking and updating of orthodox analytic work (Rapaport, 1951, 1954, 1957}. It is, essentially, an elaboration of the economic and structural points of view of psychoanalytic theory. The economic point of view is concerned with the availability and deployment of psychological energies, while the structural point of view is concerned with the formation, nature, and function of psychological structures. In the beginning of his work, Rapaport was. concerned with the general characteristics of psychic energy, and then the specific attributes of attentional energy in the theory. Rapaport defined psychic energy (much as the physicists do) as the capacity to do psychologica1 work and assumed that it is subject to the principles of conservation and of entropy. The law of conservation states that the sum of kinetic and potential energy within a closed physical system is constant. The person, however, may be regarded as an open system, stated Rapaport, since energy exchanges take place between the person and the environment. On the other hand, structural factors govern energy exchanges between the organism and the environment, and in so doing delay or prevent discharge of energy. 36 There are thus, constraints or limits upon discharge, and Rapaport took the position that the psychic apparatus might be viewed as approximating a closed system. The investigator's interest here was in Rapaport*s assumption of a limit on the energy available to the apparatus of attention. Freud implied this in the Project when he wrote that conscious thought is easily derailed by affects and drives because attention cathexes provide only a small counterweight to drive processes (Freud, 1954, pp. 347-445). This idea implies a limited quantity, otherwise, attention might be mobilized to provide a sufficient counterweight: Becoming conscious is connected with the application of a particular psychical function, that of attention-- a function which, as it seems, is only available in a specific quantity, and this may have been diverted from the train of thought in question onto some other purpose. (Freud, 1954, p. 349) This conception was put fort’ h to account for the restricted scope of consciousness, and that is the central proposition in Rapaport*s theory of attention cathexis. Rapaport comes to the conclusion, in modern garb, that there is a limited amount of energy available to the person with which to attend. When energy is bound by neurotic cathexes, less energy is available to attend to the world as a whole. Thus, attentiveness may, in general, be limited. This conception is right in line with one-half of the hypothe sizing in this investigation. 37 The Current Status of Psychoanalytic Concepts Before continuing the review of the literature on perceptual defense, it is noted that the investigator has relied heavily on the concepts from psychoanalysis for a major part of the hypothetical construction: concepts such as unconscious, repression, suppression, cathexes, defense, etc., have been used as foundations for the investigator’s "hunches" about attentiveness, vigilance, and Type I and Type II attentiveness. What of these concepts, and their place in psychoanalytic theory in general? Though Humanistic Existential psychology is harsh in its criticism of Freudian concepts, especially in terms of its meta- psychological formulations (Ofman, 1976, 1981; Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970; Sartre, 1956), it seemed only fair to comment on recent formulations about the general scientific status of psychoanalytic thought. A frequent criticism directed against psychoanalytic theory by many scientific psychologists is that there has been a lack of convincing research support for many of its central propositions. Until recently, this criticism has been largely warranted, particularly if one thinks in terms of programmatic research efforts using experimental methods which have, indeed, produced relatively unequivo cal findings that have proved capable of experimental 38 replication. And replication is the sine qua non of experimental work. It is interesting to note that more than fifteen years ago, two independent programs of experimental research were instituted to correct this deficiency via an experimental study of one central aspect of psycho analytic theory--the relationship between psychopathology and unconscious wishes. In terms of this work, unconscious wishes form part of one's i nten t i on aIity and thus such work is highly relevant (though this investigator disagrees with its explanation) to this thesis. This work is not the place in which to review the actual experimental design and execution of the studies on the "hard" evidence for psychodynamic constructs, but it is the place to note the conclusions that are reached by one astute reviewer of the evidence (Silverman, 19 76). In reviewing the findings from two independent research programs over the last fifteen years, programs which have been dedicated to studying the psychoanalytically-posited relationship between psychopathology and conflict over unconscious and aggressive wishes, Silverman finds that the bulk of the studies have employed subliminal presen tation of wish-related material, and the hypnotic stimu lation of these wishes. The findings, the author concluded, bear out that the relationship has been supported; there 39 is a relationship between the stimulation of unconscious and aggressive wishes, and psychopathology. Specifically, Silverman (1976) found the following: 1. there is abundant support for the proposition that the stimulations of libidinal and aggressive mental contents can intensify psychopathology; 2. there has been a limited amount of support for the proposition that there are specific relationships between particular kinds of libidinal and aggressive mental contents and particular kinds of psychopathologies; 3. there has been a limited amount of clear-cut support for the proposition that there is an inverse relationship between the adequacy of an individual's defenses against the emergence of libidinal and aggressive mental contents and the appearance of psychopathology; 4. there has been clear-cut though sparse support for the proposition that the pathogenicity of libidinal and aggressive mental contents depends on the impulse to express them remaining unconscious; 5. the direct evidence for the proposition that libidinal and aggressive mental contents are pathogenic because they are potentially anxiety-arousing is both somewhat sparse and equivocal. This finding relates directly to this work, and clearly calls for both a different conceptualization and different experimental a p p r o a c h . ____________________________________________ 40 6. the proposition that the libidinal and aggres sive mental contents that underlie psychopathology are derivatives of wishes has not yet been directly supported. Silverman summarized: Thus, different components of the psychoanalytic formulations have been supported to varying degrees. Even if we limit ourselves to those components for which there is clear- cut support, the data that have been cited can be said to pose a substan tive challenge to critics of psycho analytic theory [For a differing view, compare Fisher & Greenberg (1977) ] . That is, if one accepts the view that the formulation under discussion comprises a central aspect of psycho analytic theory, [the connection between psychopathology and aggressive wishes] these critics are obliged to demonstrate that the findings under consideration are either artifacts or accountable for by some nonpsycho- analytic theoretical view. (Silverman, 1976, p. 634) It is the proposition of this investigator that the concept of intentionality provides just such a nonpsycho- analytic view. In yet another massive review of the credibility of the Freudian theoretical structure, the following has come to light: There seems a need for a new approach to dream interpretation, an approach which relies much more heavily on the manifest content of the dream work; the portrayal of the boy's acquisition of male identity and superego values 41 seem more a function of the father's nurturance than his threatening hostility; there is deep skepticism towards those formulations that aim specifically to define the manner in which Oedipal development of the female differs from that of the male; and that there is a need to maintain a very conservative and "fundamentally questioning position concerning the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy and even whether the therapy exists are a clearly definable set of operations" (Fisher & Greenberg, 1977, p. 414). On the positive side, we have affirmed the basic soundness of Freud*s thinking about the following: (a) the oral and anal character concepts as meaningful dimensions for understanding important aspects of behavior; (b) the Oedipal and castration factors in male personality development; (c) the relative importance of concern about loss of love in the woman * s as compared to the man's personality economy; (d) the etiology of homosexuality; (e) the influence of anxiety about homosexual impulses upon paranoid delusion formation; (f) the soundness of the train of interlocking ideas about the anal character, homosexuality, and paranoid delusion formation; (g) the possible venting function of the dream (Fisher & Greenberg, 1977) . The Idea of the Unconscious Since the idea of the unconscious as a psychological entity is so central to the preliminary thoughts in this 42 work, a word needs to be said about the validity of the unconscious as a psychological concept. In a recent review of the concept, Shevrin and Dickman (1980) indicated that the different avenues of research and theorizing about the psychological unconscious converge on three fundamental propositions: 1. The initial cognitive stage for all stimuli seems to occur outside of the field of conscious awareness. 2. This initial cognitive stage outside of con sciousness is psychological in nature, is active in its effect upon consciousness, and can be different from conscious cognition in its principles of operation. 3. Consciousness of a stimulus is a later and optional stage in cognition. It might merely be noted in passing, here, that the above three propositions quite adequately define the pre- cognitive or pre-reflective (immediate) perceptual mode to which this investigation addressed itself in the essay review on intentionality below. Nevertheless, the above three propositions raise an interesting question. If the initial stages of cognition are unconscious, what factors, then determine the emergence into consciousness of a particular stimulus event? The literature seems to suggest three groups of factors that, working individually or in conjunction, determine this 43 final— conscious— step in cognition. The factors are: (a) stimulus factors such as loudness, brightness, figural coherence, etc.; (b) state factors such as the level of arousal in the person, the sleep,stage, personal fatigue, distractibility, etc., and, importantly for this investi gation, (c) motivational factors such as avoidance of anxiety (defense), guilt, conflicts, etc. Cognitive theorists such as Neisser (1967, 1976), have made reference to all three factors, while. Broadbent (1958) proposed a model which allowed for the state of the organism to affect the selection of stimuli that become conscious. Treisman (1964) posited genetic thresholds which are low for biologically and emotionally important stimuli; thresholds designed to permit these stimuli to pass through higher filter systems into conscious awareness. To clinicians, there is special interest in the last group of factors which consists mainly of motivational components. Several studies by Kostandov and Arzumanov (1977), and Shevrin (1973) strongly suggest that the specific emotional content of a stimulus may raise the threshold for the perception of that stimulus, with the clear implication that the stimulus is analyzed prior to the person's awareness of it! As Posner (19 73) pointed out in connection with his research on attentional processes, although a person may 44 be aware of the fact that a particular stimulus has "popped" into awareness, the person may be quite unaware of the preceding complex selection process— this, the investigator believes, might be an adequate definition of intentionality. Importantly, evidence of this kind provides the bridge to the psychoanalytic concept of repression which was reviewed above. In this light, repression might be viewed as a motivated (intentional) inhibition of awareness of a particular stimulus. This intentional (motivated) inhibition may work, independently of stimulus strength and state of arousal. This is the seminal thought that led to the use of non sense s y1lab1e s as stimuli in this work. By the use of neutral stimuli, an attempt was made to "ferret out" the motivational (intentional) elements alone, because as Shevrin and Dickman (1980) pointed out, "It is conceivable that at least some of the factors affecting the preattentive process are motivational in nature" (p. 432). These authors further point out: The assumption of unconscious psycho logical processes appears to be a conceptual necessity in a variety of models dealing with selective attention, subliminal perception, .... Ironically, these areas of investigation are entirely experimental, not clinical, in nature. . . . Behaviorism, for its part, must accommodate itself to 45 accepting the importance of what goes on inside the "black box". . . . The clear message from much recent thinking in psychology appears to be that behavior cannot be understood without taking conscious experience into account and that conscious experience cannot be fully understood without taking uncon scious psychological processes into account. The laboratory and the consult ing room do seem to be sharing at least a common wall, which may in fact turn out to have a door in it. (Shevrin & Dickman, 1980, p. 432) Perceptual Defense; The Background for Intentionality That which a person perceives may depend as much upon who he is as upon that which is "out there." A great deal of research has been conducted in an attempt to support or to deny this generalization and to turn the investigation into a system of precise and scientifically documented statements about the relationship between personality and perception. Most of this research has been in the area called perceptual defense. This part of the review of the literature will examine the major issues and findings in this area— an area marked by intense controversy and intriguing unanswered questions. In addi tion, a section was added on the concept of intentionality which might be a centripetal concept pointing towards a more satisfying and parsimonious theoretical resolution of the conceptual difficulties in this area. 46 A brief historical perspective might be useful. Most of the studies in the area began, at least formally, over thirty years ago with a series of publications by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman (1947)--two psychologists interested in the perceptual approach to behavior. These were quickly followed by other publications under their direction (McGinnies, 1949; Postman, 1948; Bruner & Postman, 1949) which suggested that the perception of external stimuli wap not free from the effects of the person, of internal events (Bruner & Goodman, 19 47; Bruner & Postman, 1947, 1948, 1949; Carter, 1949, Kelley, 1949; Klein & Holzman, 1950; Klein,Meister, & Schlesinger, 19 49; Klein & Schlesinger, 1949; McClelland & Lieberman, 1949; McGinnies, 1949; Postman & Bruner, 1949; Postman, Bruner & McGinnies, 1948, Witkin, 1949). This trend in the literature was begun by the so-called personality-centered researchers, initiated when experimental psychologists began to work in a clinical setting. Such workers in the field as Elsa Frenke1-Brunswik (1948, 1949), and Klein 1966, 1970), who worked at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, began to wonder about personality variables as they were affected by perceptual issues. The work really began with the concept of personality rigidity (this was just after World War II where concern with the "Nazi" personality was high) as it seemed to show itself in thought, perception, 47 and remembering. Frenkel-Brunswik, under the direction of Nevitt Sanford, carried out a series of experiments which demonstrated that personalities could be categorized in terms of certain basic patterns named as rigid, authori tarian, etc. Though a variety of tests were used in these experiments, it was mainly the Thematic Apperception Test that was relied upon. Further research showed that rigid, authoritarian personalities were racially prejudiced Rokeach was involved in these studies, and his work showed that persons with high ethnocentrism were more rigid or less flexible in performing problem-solving tasks which involved basically neutral material (Rokeach, 1943). The major emphasis of these researches was upon the relationship between certain personality processes and perception. More recently, a ubiquitous theme became the interest in the selectivity of organization of needs, expectancies, priorities, and finally, in the issue of psychodynamic defense. This focus on selectivity, particularly upon the perceiver's selective strategy towards emotionally tinged stimuli, gradually developed into the current concern of researchers. This concern seemed to be organized under yet another rubric: inten tionality ,where stimuli not only are or are not perceived, but where they and "the world changes" (Van den Berg, 1972). 48 It might he useful to summarize the one study which began the actual work on controlled laboratory research on the emotional factors in perception. This study became known as the "poor boy, rich boy" study. In this experi ment, a group of thirty ten-year olds was tested with an apparatus consisting of a wooden box with a screen at one end and a knob at the lower right-hand corner. By turning the knob, the children could vary the diameter of the circle of light shining on the screen. Two groups of children, one rich and the other poor, were asked to match the size of the circle of light to the size of coins of various denominations. A control group matched the light to the size of neutral cardboard disks. The coins were deemed "socially valued objects," and as such, the results of the experiment indicated that they were judged larger in size than the cardboard disks. Furthermore, and in line with the experimental hypothesis of the experiment, the poor group overestimated the size of the coins significantly more than did the rich group (Brunner & Goodman, 1947). This experiment indicated, wrote the authors, "That value and need organize visual perception" (Bruner & Goodman, 1947, p. 42). But this study was criticized because there was no proof, critics wrote, that values and needs were the determining factors, since other variables such as past 49 experiences with coins were not controlled. Thus colleagues attempted to overcome this criticism (a valid one, the authors admitted) by using hyponosis to make persons rich or poor. Ashley, Harper, & Runyon (1951), before hypnotizing their subjects, had middle-class persons adjust the size of the light spot until it looked equal to the actual size of each of three coins: a nickel, a dime, and a quarter. When made to forget their real life histories, and given "poor" life histories under hypnosis, the same individuals made settings which were consistently and significantly larger than the ones they had made in their normal state. When given "rich" life histories under hypnosis, they made consistently smaller settings than they had previously made. The authors concluded "that their perceptions were affected by needs, and values since . . . [their] prior experiences with money were identical [they were the same persons]" (p. 570). The effectiveness of the "poor" and "rich" life histories in inducing different needs and values was further corrobor ated by the fact that when under "poor" suggestion, the subjects sat upright and worked with great care, whereas under "rich" suggestion, they slouched in their chairs and worked rapidly and condescendingly. In a later study along the same lines, Stayton and Weiner (1961) studied "Perceptual Accentuation" of a 50 valued characteristic. This characteristic was. indicated in an "i like VW" study of owners of Volkswagen cars. Those subjects who valued owning their Volkswagens tended — consistently and significantly— to perceive it as smaller (in this case, small was the valued characteristic — even before the gas shortage.') than those subjects who indicated an indifference about it. In the same "light" vein as the above, Solley and Haigh (1957) used measures of content analysis of chil dren's drawings at different times of the year. The researchers discovered, as their hypothesis was verified, that drawings of Santa Claus made before Christmas were bigger than those made after the holiday. In response to possible criticism, the authors pointed out that th-is was not a general "euphoria affect" (p. 4), but a Santa- „ specific effect since only drawings of Santa Claus got bigger as the holiday approached. This was the only significant difference in size. Other drawings earned non-significant size differences. Craddick (1967), in a very carefully designed experiment, found that the defense called "the avoidance motive of fear" seemed to be implicated in the finding tfiat the average size of drawings of witches decreased in a statistically significant degree (p = ^.01) at Halloween. 51 The active role of emotional and motivational factors in perception is shown in the fact that persons tend to misperceive or "not see" stimuli that are threat ening, or socially taboo. These stimuli, in addition to being misperceived, seemed to also require a longer recognition reaction-time than neutral stimuli. McGinnies (194 9) offered the first study in this area to supply support for this hypothesis of perceptual defense. McGinnies presented college students with seven "critical" words such as "belly, raped, and bitch" interspersed among eleven other, more innocuous words. The duration of exposure was controlled tachistoscopically. A longer duration of exposure was required for identification of the critical words than for the neutral ones. In addition, — and this is important to our work— a greater galvanic skin response (GSR) to the taboo words during the time interval before they were reported by the subjects as "seen" was used for evidence for an unconscious mechanism of perceptual defense. As with other things (the early response to Freud1s theories, for instance) "scientific" psychologists had great difficulty with, the idea of an "internal" notion such as perceptual defense--especially if it involved "unconscious" or "subconscious" factors. Critics indicated that the differences in recognition thresholds could 52 result either from differential sensitivity to taboo words because of their antisocial meaning (as the perceptual defense researchers claimed) or from the fact that they are less frequently seen under normal viewing conditions. Or it could be that the effect was not a perceptual one at all, but one of response inhibition— perhaps the subjects perceived the "bad" words but were shy about reporting them (Rosenzweig & Porter, 1976). Several studies were conducted, then, to help sup port the perceptual defense hypothesis. Threatening and nonthreatening words were printed in booklets where they were totally blurred on the top page, but became decreas ing ly blurred (greater signal vs. noise) with each page as it was turned. Threat words required more pages turned before they were recognized. This seemed to be true even though the frequency of the words themselves was controlled. The same statistically significant effect (F-p = -d.001) was found when the subjects were alerted to the impending threat words and when the sex of the subject and the experimenter were identical (Cowen & Beier, 195 4). McGinnies (one of the main workers in the field) and Sherman (19 52) conducted an experiment where the frequencies of the threatening words were again controlled, but this time tliey were presented in pairs. A "pretask" word, sometimes taboo and sometimes neutral, was presented 53 * for .01 second. If. it was not recognized, the pretask word was again exposed tachistoscopically for two seconds, followed by the task word for .02 seconds. This was done until the task word was finally recognized. When the pretask word was a taboo word, the threshold for recogni tion of the neutral task word associated with it tended to be higher than when the pretask word was neutral. Note that the former comments on the Freudian background (that cathexes tended to "bleed over" to similar or associated objects, events, and persons) are somewhat validated by this interesting study by McGinnies and Sherman (1952). In a study of the manner in which purposes affect a stimulus situation and determine what persons will perceive despite rather common "sensory impingements," researchers studied the events at the Princeton vs. Dartmouth game of 195 3. Princeton was the target of quite a bit of Dartmouth newspaper coverage and dormitory talk for weeks before the game. The "Get Princeton Preppies" campaign was in full gear, and it must have had its desired effect because, it was reported, the game was very rough with many injuries sustained by both teams. The researchers at each school gave a questionnaire to a sample of undergraduate students who had seen the game. Each group then viewed the same film of the game and recorded any infractions of the rules that they saw. The results 54 indicated that the attitudes of nearly all Princeton students were that the game was "rough'and dirty," with 90% of them believing the other side started the rough play. Dartmouth students also described the game as "rough" but said that the two sides were equally to blame. The Princetonians recorded the Dartmouth team as guilty of twice as many penalties as their team. In contrast, students from another university (which did not play) saw the teams making the same number of infractions and as being penalized in an equitable manner. The authors concluded that although everyone watched the same game, "they clearly saw a very different game" (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, p. 133). "New Look" theorists, from the beginning, posited not just inhibitory reactions to emotional inputs but vigilance or enhancement effects as well. Perceptual vigilance refers to a relative lowering of recognition thresholds to emotional stimuli, while perceptual defense refers to a relative elevation of recognition thresholds. The general idea behind studies of this type was that a clinically sophisticated conception of "defense" had to allow for differences in personalities and, consequently, different modes or styles of reacting to emotional inputs, i.e., inhibition (repression) as well as vigilance (sensitization, etc.). Some researchers have gone beyond 55 this point, proposing a general curvilinear relationship ' between sensitivity to input and extent of input emotion ality (Brown, 1961). Consequently, the term perceptual defense is frequently used as a general rubric subsuming both elevation as well as inhibition of sensitivity resulting from stimulus emotionality. Major criticisms leveled against the perceptual defense (and vigilance) position took issue with either the perceptual or defensive underpinnings of the construct, with the ultimate issue becoming the locus, of the effect. A critical examination of these various arguments is essential for any theoretical reformulation, in addition to which the substantive criticisms constitute formulations in their own right, although they may be counter- formulations. As such, they must be taken into account or incorporated in*any new theoretical departure. One of the most intractable problems of the perceptual defense hypothesis, has been that which appears to be a logical paradox (Eriksen & Browne, 19 56) which the authors state as follows: if perceptual defense is really perceptual, how can the perceiver selectively defend himself against a particular stimulus unless he first perceives, the stimulus.— at some level of awareness — against which h.e should defend himself. Note the similarity of this, criticism with OfmanTs (1976) critique of the 56 Freudian unconscious. Researchers have responded to this issue in a number of ways: by ignoring it, by dismissing it as a semantic issue (Erderlyi, 1974), or by constructing theories or descriptions of perceptual processes which attempt to account for it. The latter has usually taken the form of introducing a multi-process concept of per ception, e.g., a psychoanalytic model (in terms of levels of consciousness), or a microgenetic model (Smith, 195 7) , or most recently, an information processing model (in terms of stages of perception or processing). Information processing models can be found in much of the research on selective attention (Treisman, 19 69) and most specifically in Erderlyi (1974), Powers (1973), Jenness, Kietzman, and Zubin (1975), and in Kietzman, Spring, and Zubin (1980). What these, researchers attempted to argue was that certain inputs reach unconscious levels of registration and identification but are blocked from conscious perception. Or, using metaphors more comfortable to us, what is promulgated is the logical possibility (empirical validity is not at issue at this point) that materials from the stimulus can be briefly held in some extremely fleeting "buffer” (a computer memory analogy) memory and may be selectively rejected from further processing and therefore from stable perceptual experience. It shall be shown in a later section (on intentionality) that there 57 is a more parsimonious explanation than the machine-model touched on here. Another semiphilosophical issue, temperamentally related to the logical paradox question, is the homunculus, little-man-inside-the-head problem. As Spence and Fein- berg (1967) put it: Do you have to presuppose [in order to accept perceptual defense] that a little man is inside, pulling the strings, or as Bruner and Post man suggested, that the superego, peering through the Judas eye , I is] scanning incoming percepts in order to decide which shall be permitted into consciousness? (p. 184) Given behavior science's horror of homunculi, particularly purposive homunculi, it is not surprising that numerous critics of the perceptual defense hypothesis have worried over this problem and have vigorously decried any implica tions concerning the existence of "unconscious manikins" (Eriksen, 1958), "super-sensitive scanning mechanisms" (Goldstein, 1962), "super-discriminating perceivers" (Eriksen, 1963) and the like. The problem of teleological homunculi has been most seriously dealt with by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960), and by the growing number of cognitive theorists (especially Neisser, 1976), by posit ing a system with control processes :for internal regula tions of input. The positing of such a system, however, is descriptive rather than being explanatory. For this 58 reason, and to that extent, the problem of the existence or non-existence of teleological entities is still not fully resolved. How is it, then, that the person defends, and what part of him/her does the defending? It is a hidden hypothesis of this work that the only way to resolve it, i.e., to explain it, is by introducing (or re-introducing in modern garb) the notion of intentionality (Chein, 1972; Fingarette, 1972; Schachtel, 1969; Van den Berg, 1972; Sartre, 1956; Ofman, 1976, 1980, 1981). The process is indeed purposive, but the purpose belongs to the intention of the person ("The Project") not to the unconscious nor to the homunculus. Set Expectancy Another major group of experiments and theoretical arguments centers around the proposition that perceptual defense is actually a function of set or expectancy. This argument against perceptual defense continues to generate periodic support (Cable, 1969; Forrest, Gordon, & Taylor, 1965). The proponents of the set explanation maintain that reported perceptual defense data are largely a consequence of the subject*s expectation about the nature of the stimulus. Curiously, this position about the nature of perceptual defense, although not generally so recognized, represents an internal argument within the 59 New Look camp, wherein the proponents of the importance of expectancies in cognitive processes criticize the importance of motives. It was not particularly meaningful for the present purpose to review the various studies .showing that expectations about input do indeed affect thresholds, as Cable (196 9) has found, for this would be merely to document the existence of a well-accepted phenomenon. The more pertinent question was whether expectancy sets pre clude by their existence the operation of wishes, motives, fears, and thus defenses in perception. In this regard, a,very large number of studies have yielded perceptual defense or vigilance data with differential expectations either directly controlled or rendered extremely unlikely (Bootzin & Natsoulas, 1965; Bootzin & Stephens, 1967; Chapman & Feasher, 1972; Dorfman, Grossberg, & Kroeker, 1965; Dulaney, 1957; Sales & Haber, 1968). Wolitzky and Wachtel (1973), and Kempler and Wiener (1963) delineated a part of expectancy theory using Postman’s term of "hypothesis theory.1 1 The distinguishing feature of this view is that the availability of the stimulus istcontingent on a predisposition to see particu lar cues; i.e., the subject sees and "organizes" cues in accordance with a specific predisposition. The locus of the modification of the cues is in the registration rather 60 than in the response to what is registered (Kempler & Wiener, 1963). The conceptual difficulty here becomes apparent when one conceives of perception as an intentional process, in which case the question arises as to what is the difference between this "registration" and the response to that which is registered? From the theorectical standpoint, moreover, the proponents of the set explanation of perceptual defense are hardly in a position to claim superior theoretical clarity or parsimony for their concept, a traditional "wastebasket" construct until recently. "Set," with its almost infinite subdivisions (mental set, permanent set, temporary set, motor set, neural set, goal set, etc.) embodying ideas such as "neurotic anxiety," "incubations process in reasoning," the "time error in psychophysics," Thorndike's "spread of reward," Tolman's "cognitive expectancies," etc., signified potentially everything-— and therefore nothing. The situation did not change until the 1960's when "set" was reformulated by some researchers (Egeth, 1967; Haber, 1966) specifically in terms of perceptual selectivity, with encoding priorities and general processing strategies assuming a critical role for the concept (Jenness, Kietzman & Zubin, 1975). Even given, however, the preferable construct of set as perceptual selectivity, the recurring shortcoming 61 pf perceptual defence theory generally is, still unres'olvedc hs. in th:e preceding problem with: the logical paradox, it is. again description without explanation, "Set’ " being equal tq 1 1 selectivity, " the question Still remains, on what basis is. this selectivity made? Again, the concept of intention seems; to be useful. In fact, it seems, reasonable to ask why cannot the notion of expectancy or set or selectivity be subsumed under the more satisfying concept of intentionality? (For example, if it is. oner's, intention to defend againat surprise, to maintain one*s. assumptive world, etc., could not the creation of set, or the basis of selectivity, be in the service of this intention?) The elaboration of this argument for intentionality as a central construct resulting in a more parsimonious and satisfying explana tion of perceptual defense and attention data is made elsewhere in this dissertation. It is, however, brought up here as essential to a critical examination of the literature. By far the most important criticism in the litera ture of the perceptual defense concept is one form or another of the response bias position. Indeed, it is a fair generalization that all of the so-called nonphilo- sophic criticisms of perceptual defense have been absorbed into the more inclusive framework of response bias. 62 Although there are numerous variations of the approach, its major thrust is, to use Eriksen*s (196 3) words, to "remove the phenomenon from the field of perception and place it back with response variables" (p. 55). Although the separation between response and perception continues to be a major preoccupation of the New Look literature (e.g., Minard, 1965), a gradual reorientation among perceptual and cognitive psycholo gists is becoming discernible (Broadbent, 1958; Haber, 1969; Morton, 1968; Neisser, 1967). For example, Morton (1968) has asserted that "the rigid dichotomy between stimulus [perceptual] and response factors is in,part, a semantic artifact" (p. 21). From the logical standpoint, it should be clear that no internal neural event imaginable could exist outside the all-enveloping sweep of the term "response" (e.g., Dol'lard & Miller, 1950) . Would it be reasonable to suggest, therefore, that because the firing of a retinal rod is unarguably a "response" to some stimulus, that the process should be removed from the field of perception and placed back with response variables? Consider Eriksen*s (1963) response "explanation" of perceptual defense. Espousing Dollard and Miller * s (1950) convention of regarding covert events such as thoughts and associations as "cue-producing responses," he ■ 63 proceeds to account for "perceptual defense effects in terms of nothing more mysterious than the empirically established effects of punishment on the probability of occurrence of responses" (p. 54), a process which, he adds later, may be "immediate and automatic" (unconscious?) and therefore homologous to the clinical concept of repression (p. 55). What is overlooked in this demonstra tion, however, is that for Dollard and Miller perceptions are cue-producing responses and should be expected to follow the same laws as other responses (p. 178) (i.e., the laws, of conditioning), rendering unclear the conclusion that needs do not affect the perceptual process but only response occurrence. (1963, p. 57) If percepts are responses, then naturally all perceptual processes are by definition response processes. As such, the argument is merely semantic and can hardly be accepted as a viable criticism of perceptual defense as a perceptual phenomenon. What Dollard and Miller (1950) and other behaviorists want to do by removing "perception" from perceptual processes is to remove perception from motivation or intention. By calling it "cue-producing responses," determined, presumably, by reinforcement and laws of conditioning, they can circumvent the black box. As can be seen, what was ostensibly a "non-philosophic" criticism boils down to very much a philosophical issue 64 as to the nature of human beings and whether or not they are to be cast in a deterministic mold. Generally, the response bias interpretation of perceptual defense can be put into three categories. The earliest one is usually known as the "response suppression hypothesis" but "report" suppression might be a more appropriate term. This hypothesis holds that subjects recognize taboo and neutral words with equal facility, but are merely reluctant to report embarassing items, requiring certainty and therefore longer exposure durations. Nothman (1962) reported significantly higher recognition thresholds when the response was oral rather than written. If this factor could account for perceptual defense-viligance data, it would place the phenomenon outside the sphere of perception. However, many experiments have yielded opposing data. For instance, Ruiz and Krauss (196 8) reported perceptual defense outcomes with report modes calculated to eliminate report suppression (as by requiring subjects to respond with a neutral word to a taboo word and vice versa). It appears, therefore, that some of the more recent data casts doubt on the applicability of the report suppression hypothesis. It might be added that the host of perceptual vigilance findings would not easily yield to a report suppression explanation, since it would 65 have to be argued that subjects adopt a more lax criterion for reporting taboo as compared to neutral items. Response Probability The second major category of response bias inter pretation is what frequently goes under the heading of "simple response bias," "response probability," or in Broadbent's (1967) terms, "pure guessing." Major proponents of the position have been Goldiamond and Hawkins (1958) and Goldstein (1962). This position suggests that the observer is a biased response emitter who outputs responses on the basis of a probablistic verbal hierarchy determined by frequency factors, past reinforcement history, etc. This hypothesis has been convincingly rebutted by a variety of investigators (e.g., Kempler & Wiener, 1963; Wiener & Shiller, 1960; Zalonc & Niewenhuyse, 1964), and needs no further detailing here. Yet the position is instructive in that it represents a more basic point of view which has many adherents producing a plethora of "scientific" literature. This point of view ends, as Kempler and Wiener (1963) suggest, "as a denial of perception" (p. 59). As such, it is an interesting surfacing of the behaviorist bias against black box variables such as perception, to say nothing of perceptual defense. Not only is the perceiver biased, the perceiver is also blind. 66 Part-Cue Response Characteristic Hypothesis The third major category of response bias is called a hypothesis by some, a theory by others. Termed the "part-cue response characteristic" hypothesis, this posi tion is distinguished by its frequent presentation as an explanation rather than outright criticism of perceptual defense (e.g., Eriksen, 1963; Kempler & Wiener, 1963). Proponents of the part-cue hypothesis (Eriksen, 1963; Eriksen & Brown, 1956; Goldstein, 1962; Kempler & Wiener, 1963; Wiener & Schiller, 1960) suggest that even under very marginal conditions of stimulation some input is registered; perceptual defense effects occur, it is asserted, through "response biases" in the elaboration of, or responses to, partial information. Kempler and Wiener (1963) criticized hypothesis theory on the grounds that it implies that the subject distorts the stimulus presented according to his predisposition. Their theory (part-cue) implies no such distortion, but asserts that the difference between the subject's response and the "correct" response is strictly a result of the subject's responding to a limited sample of the information input. This seems ultimately tautological in that the theory fails to account for, or to provide any basis for, such "partializing." In addition, as Neisser (1967) has pointed out, there is a tendency of the position to be ambiguous 67 about the locus of elaboration. The notion that input is elaborated is, in itself, certainly no argument against a perceptual effect. As Gregory (1966) has noted, "Perception is not determined simply by the stimulus pattern. . . .perception involves going beyond the immedi ately given evidence of the senses. . . . The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence" (p. 11). Certainly a host of phenomena, classically conceived as representing "perception" or "sensation"— constancy scaling, depth perception, illusions apparent movement, contrast and context effects, color mixture, etc.— involve synthesizing, elaborative filling-in processes. Whether compelling, misconceived, or simply trivial, the major criticism of the perceptual defense and vigilance hypotheses are reducible to the question of the locus of selectivity. Of ultimate importance is the fact that most of the literature in the field assumes implicitly or explicitly the paradigm of perception: stimulus perceptual ^ response system system system and poses the question, merely, as a choice between two loci on the above flow chart; the earlier perceptual system or the later response system. A perceptual model of this type embodies two tacit assumptions: first, that 68 a formal distinction exists between perception and response, and second that the flow of communication is unidirectional. By its very form, the model constrains any interpretation to an either-or choice within a bipartite system (presumably the "stimulus system" is external to the organism). Such a constraint is only arbitrary however, and falls inside the Newtonian- Cartesian paradigm which the concept of intentionality (below) challenges. Fortunately, the bulk of the perceptual defense literature notwithstanding, the presuppositions forced upon theory by such a dichotomous model are brought into question by important work on selective attention, cogni tive theory, information processing theory, and most recently by "script theory" (Abelson, 1981; Shank & . Abelson, 1977; Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Mandler, 1978; Markus, 1977; Neisser, 1976; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977; Taylor & Crocker, 1980; Tesser & Leone, 1977; Tversky & Kahneman, 1977). It should be merely pointed out that this work relies rather heavily on "computer" or machine analogies for its explanatory power: Recently, considerable psychological interest has developed in abstract knowledge structures or schemata.... The concept of the schema is not new .... What is new is the growing influence on the concept of developments in arti ficial intelligence. The recent focus 69 in artificial intelligence is on ways to program computers to "understand" natural texts and visual scenes by using higher order knowledge structures .... that embody expectations guiding lower order processing of the stimulus complex. (Abelson, 1981, p. 715) These theories, however seemingly disparate, have elements which express a return to the "perceiver" and a view of perception as a multi-level process based on an interaction between the person and the environment. Between the stimulus and the response, not just a hypo thetical construct intervenes (perception), but a whole complex of actively interacting systems (Neisser, 1967; Haber, 1969). It is incorrect to think that the eye works like a camera, providing a picture of reality for the brain to see. In fact, what registers in the eye is a poor rendition of the world and requires great transformations to become meaning ful. Instead of giving us a faithful copy of the outside world, the receptors merely provide raw material that can be used to form perceptions. Our percep tion is constructive: the perceiver actively generates (constructs) his version of reality. (Emphasis supplied) (Mischel & Mischel, 1977, p. 151) The above should not be construed as suggesting that any one of the above theories unravels the knot of selectivity. That it does not is amply clear, for instance, in the voluminous literature on selective attention (Broadbent, 1958; Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963; Moray, 1969, 7Q 1970; Mostofsky, 1970; Neisser, 1967; Treisman, 1969; Swetz & Kristofferson, 1970; Kietzman, Spring & Zubin, 1980). Since one major premise of the information process ing approach is that input is sequentially subjected to different types of transformations and storages (Powers, 1973; Erderlyi, 1974), it would appear only natural to assume that different selection processes might be operative at different levels of processing. It is through its inherent implication of multiple loci of selectivity that the information processing approach acquires its greatest usefulness. It is possible to consider, thereby, selectivity and the perceptual defense issue not as something to be explained by a simple one-shot effect, but as a fundamental expression of cognitive control processes (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1969; Klein, 197Q; Shiffrin & Atkinson, 1969; Neisser, 1967; Abelson, 1981) which exercise selective regulation. In the literature on cognitive theory (Klein, 19 70; Sampson, 1981) cognitive controls have the status of 1 1 intervening variables" and define rules by which perception, memory, and other basic qualitative forms (such as selection) of experience are shaped. Cognitive controls are conceptualized by Gardner, Holzman, Klein, Linton,and Spence (1959), as: 71 slow changing, developmentally stabilized structures: (a) relatively invariant over a given class of situations and intentions; (b) they are operational despite the shifts in situations and behavioral contexts typical of cogni tive activity from momemt to moment. Cognitive controls refer to a level organization that is more general than the specific structural components underlying perception, recall, judgment. The invariant which defines a control has to do with the manner of coordination between a class of environmental situations. They are the individual's means of programming the properties, relations, and con straints of events in such a way as to provide an adaptively adequate resolution of the intentions which brought him into an encounter with reality. (Emphasis supplied) (pp. 5-6) Thus, the point of view advanced here is that the question for perceptual defense is not whether the phenomenon results from perceptual or response biases, or even at what point selectivity occurs in a broader information-processing chain, but rather that perception is, as Gardner, et. al. (1959), put it, an intentional process. And intentionality is the next subject. The Concept of Intentionality There can be no doubt that value, or, at least interest is associated with lowered recognition thresholds for relevant stimuli at least within certain limits. How this relation ship is mediated we do not know; perhaps subjects have long-term 72 n sets;" for highly valued (or interest ing), stimuli. (Emphasis supplied) (Brown, 1961, p. 28) The investigator submits that, although the language is. differentr-.^coming from a behavior-science slant— that which. Brown is really talking about (when he wrote of long term sots) is the concept of intentionality. Intention ality, is here advanced as. the most parsimonious of explanations for that which occurs when persons "see," or 1 1 do not see1 1 stimuli impinging upon them. The following, then, is an essay-review of the literature, with some quite original thoughts and formula tions; about the root concept of intentionality. Much of it was adapted from Ofman and Benton (1981). "It can never be our job to reduce anything to anything" Wi11genstein (1958) „ Introductory and Basic Suppositions The way things are, that which Allen Wheelis calls "The Scheme of Things, . . .the lie necessary to life" (Wheelis, 1980, p. 69) is the fact of our being suffused with a view of the person which is an inheritance of the Cartesian-Newtonian dualism and mechanism— a view trans muted to psychology from a now outmoded philosophy and physics with genuflection and with gratitude. But that view (the Cartesian dualistic, reductionistic and 73 deterministic view) was vacated by philosophy and physics almost as soon as it was formulated. The emerging redefinition of knowledge is already at a phase in its under standing of the particularities of inquiry which renders markedly obsolete that view of science still regulative of inquiring practice in psychology. This can be said in utter literalness, for the view in question was imported, with undisguised gratitude, from the philosophy of science and related sources some three decades ago but, while remaining more or less congealed in psychology, was subjected to such attrition in the areas of its origin that in‘those areas it can no longer properly be said to exist. Psychology is thus in the unenviable position of standing on philosophical foundations which began to be vacated by philosophy almost as soon as the former had borrowed them. (Koch, 1981, p. 5) It is only in the bastions of "normal science" (Kuhn, 1970) as translated by the human sciences that it is held to with the tenacity of an infant grasping its pacifier. The Cartesian mold with which the human sciences are infected understands the person, the body, and the relation between the two as just that— as a relationship between the two. The engrammata of dualism persists. As a function of this remainder, the concept of the mind affecting the body exists in an analogous way to the soul affecting the body, or to the "mind" as a controlling 74 "chip" or device affecting the printer of a word processing computer. Such dualistic anachronisms are evidenced in the psychological literature by the ubiquitous terms such as projection, transference, and conversions. The concept of conversion is purely analogous to» the concept of "not seeing" or "seeing very well," of denial or of hyper- vigilance. Thus we shall, for a moment, use the concept of conversion as an analogously explanatory construct. A closer look, at this last term, conversion, will serve to illustrate the problem, and to set the stage for our further discussion. In terms of the physical complaints which patients present, the quotidian therapeutic position (after the standard physical examination by the internist) is that the patient*s body is healthy. The patient, however, is not pretending in the normal sense of the word. The patient is really "sick," but sick in a way that is different: it is not a physical illness, but rather a mental illness that "the patient has." And it is the mental disturbance that is "placed" in the body. The patient, thus, converts. The term conversion appeared early in Freud' s . theoretical conceptions and represented for him the means by which, repressed psychic excitation could be 75 transformed into a somatic expression of the energies involved. . . . The term. . . .remains today. . . .indis solubly linked with hysteria to designate that form of the disorder manifested by sensorimotor symptoms . . . . Conversion is a useful concept in explaining the processes involved in the constellation of neurotic symptoms evidenced by an individual, but it confuses the issue to dwell on the mystery of the transformation of a mental event into a somatic event as a process associated with hysteria, for the same mysterious transformation exists in the translation of a conscious volitional idea into action. . . . The difference lies in the fact that in hysteria transformation occurs outside of the sphere of conscious volition and control— that is, in a state Of dis sociation. [Note that the mystery of dissociation is taken for granted!]. (Nicholi, 1976, p. 161) The formula for conversion is the grammar of Cartesian dualism: 1. The person consists of two parts: the body and the psyche. 2. Unlike the psyche, the body is an object within which the psyche resides. The philosophical, metaphysical statement is as follows (and it is important to note that it a metaphysical, not an empirical statement): psychological disturbances affect or express themselves physically. Somehow, dissociation occurs, and the mysterious gap between the psyche and the body is breached. But every 76 attempt within the Cartesian-Newtonian framework ('i.e., within the Freudian concept of the Psychic Apparatus, which is the epitome of this way of thought (Yankelovich. & Barrett, 1970) to elucidate how this event occurs must revert to a dualistic doctrine. "The statement that mental difficulties express themselves physically is a transgression of a metaphysical gap. No one knows what this statement means" (Van den Berg, 1972, p. 21; cf., Brown, 1961, pp. 28, 65). Another central point to be reiterated here is that there is no escape from the responsibility of a philosophical position. The physician or the therapist who frames the person sit ting before him in terms of conversion or interaction (between the body and the mind) is making a metaphysical statement— and thus teaches the patient that position, or better, reinforces that position in the patient--and this is central: a position of which the patient's suffering is a function. The patient suffers his view of himself and his view of his body, as well as the world to which the person attends or is inattentive. "The more firmly an hypothesis is imbedded in a larger cognitive organization, the less of appropriate stimulus information will be required to confirm it" (Brown, 1961, p. 66) . 77 In sum, in thinking in terms of conversion, one takes for granted--mostly in an uninspected way™the Cartesian dualism to which we are all heir (.Bugental, 1967, Ch. 1? Matson, 1966, 1967). The scheme of things is a system of order. Beginning as our view of the world. . . . It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having taken place. It comes with one *s mother's milk, is chanted in school, proclaimed from the White House, insinuated by television, validated at Harvard. Like the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, becomes simply reality, the way things are. It is the lie necessary to life. (Wheelis, 1980, p. 69) A non-embracing of the Cartesian position leads, to a very different way of thinking about persons.: a holistic way, a way which speaks of the absolute unity of the person, and of an immanent lucidity of the personality to itself (there is no black box inside the person called the unconscious, unknown and unknowable in principle), and of no mysterious leap from the psyche to the soma. That way is a way which undercuts the Cartesian dualistic view of the person by the doctor, and a way which may help the patient adopt a view which is antithetical to the one which, is. suffered and from which one suffers., since ”, * * we become different beings, in the light of a 78 changed idea of our own being" (Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970, p. 14). Consciousness and Intentionality In existential thought there are several founda tional concepts which must be addressed in order to grasp the centripetal concept of intentionality. The idea of human consciousness is one such concept. There is a schism in nature insofar as conscious ness is concerned. The world is divided into two elemental forms, Being-in-itself (all of non-human things, and animals) and Being-for-itself (human, self-reflexive, consciousness). Now this way of thinking is not merely a "philosophical entertainment," a psychological nicety which borders upon dilletantism. The existential revolt of which the above definition of consciousness is a beginning sees the definition of human consciousness as foundational to its aim: a praxis— a change in our view of ourselves and of our world and as a function of such a change, to affect our lives directly--not merely to change the way in which we think or speak about our lives. It will be recalled in the former discussion that essentialism and Cartesianism have the status of an implicit assumption which is rarely made explicit; connected to this assumption is the view that it is 79 apparent that the system based on such views is not working. "We must conclude that the attempts to explain perceptual defense relationships in terms of behavior theory have not been very successful" (Brown, 1961, p. 83). What is needed, then, is a different set of assumptions about what the person is, and what is possible for persons— a different consciousness which might enable humans to free themselves from the pitfalls of rigid and deterministic ways of thinking and thus, being. This different consciousness must allow for a measure of salvation through authentic, responsible and reciprocal human relationships. It matters, thus, terribly, how implicit assumptions are framed. It is upon those assumptions that lives are led. The conception of con sciousness is such a notion (Corey & Maas, 1976, 1980). Though this root concept of the schism of nature into Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself is a difficult concept, it is designed to permit of a different conscious ness of the self— of what the person is. And again the previous discussion is recalled, which made the point that to merely name (make explicit) one's assumptions is to place them in abeyance-— if even for a moment— and that we become different persons as a function of a different view of ourselves. In sum, this proposed way of thinking, is designed to avoid the essentialistic Cartesian dualism to 80 which we are heir, that dualism which assigns mind and things to different categories, different substances. The Humanistic Existentialist emphasizes the oneness of being: both exist. To simplify, it can be said that the schism of the in-itself and the for-itself is merely a way of stating that existence encompasses both: things and minds. Things, however, are determined, fixed (of an essentialis- tic order), pre-defined by their structure. Minds, human minds, are different in kind. In the human sense, exist ence precedes essence--the first principle of existen tialism (Sartre, 1967; Ofman, 1976; Kaplan, 1961; Bugental, 19 65). Human consciousness is undetermined, free, though limited because it is in the world; and thus it is human freedom, not an idealized version of "freedom." Everything else but man is subject to the law of identity: A is identical with A; A is A, and will be A, nothing but A. Everything but man is just the thing that it is and absolutely nothing else. Only man is not subject to the law of identity. . . . In the very act of becoming aware of the particular "this" that he is--whatever it may be— the human being has already transcended it. Man is the being whose existence is constituted by this fact: that he is continually becoming what he was not. (Kaplan, 1.961,- p. 104) Human consciousness is a negation, it injects a film of nothingness between itself and the object of its purview. That nothingness is freedom, and its grammar is 81 intentionality. Again,, consciousness- has no interiority, it is. always conscious of something, it is thus, always in relation to its objects— to the world. It is important to note the warning that Renee La Farge gave about the temptation to reach consciousness in itself, as a pure, isolated form’ — insular of its objects. That, he states, is an "unjustifiable abstraction." Consciousness cannot be separated from being and from the world (La Farge, 19.70, pp. 36-38.) That is the uniquely human event from which all else flows. It is; a new definition of man, a definition which rests on triple pillars,: freedom, intentionality, and a connected-with-the-world and with-others dyadic circuit. Being-in-the-world; The Basic Principle This, very grounding principle means, that the person is; inextricably wedded to the world which is around the person. The world frames, outlines, and permits of the person’s existence. It is., quite literally, the very ground of being. There is. no person and the world, there is a person-i,n-the world. Thus there is. no such event as. a conversion,, and there can be no event such as projection. That which a 82 person "sees" ("You are angry"; "There is no word there"; "I see it very clearly") is not "merely" a projection, a distortion, but an actual seeing of the reality of the object or person in the arena. "I see it" or "I see them," and every effort which one makes, by oneself, introspec- tively, to delete the outside, to investigate feelings by themselves, to tear feelings and moods or emotions from the world around one, leaves one not knowing what to do. Because of the intentionality of consciousness, we are in direct contact with the world. . . . The decisive point is, . . .it is the thing itself that presents itself, stands before our mind, and with which we are in contact. (Gurwitsch, 1967, p. 52) All consciousness. . . .is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no "content". . . . A table is not in consciousness— not even in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space, . beside the window, etc. The existence of the table in fact is a center of opacity for consciousness; . . . . The first procedure. . . . ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world. All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing. All that tfyere is of intention in my actual consciousness is directed toward the outside, toward the table. (Sartre, 1956, pp. li-lii) 8 3 Not knowing what to do when one attempts to examine consciousness itself— as an object--one "manufactures1 1 the outside world. As in sensory deprivation experiments, the person hallucinates the world for him. Else the person would stand alone, isolated, "wrapped" before a cement wall where the self meets only itself. One1s whole being, it seems, is in the world. There is no exit. Objects and we are different under different circumstances, and one does not project: "he IS angry," "the word is not there." Introspection, thus,' is a problematic construct in phenomenological and Humanistic Existentialist psychology. This is so because introspection implies a pure subject. The Humanistic Existentialist assertion is that neither a pure subject nor a pure object -exists. The Object is Different (Things Change! The fact that any object "for us" has a nominal identity is not meant to imply that it is the same object under different circumstances. This is a problem strictly analogous to the issue of the Bifurcation of Nature to which Whitehead (.1920) addressed himself. This issue refers to the world of objective or scientific explanation versus the problem of the human, lived, immediate exper ience (Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970; Solomon, 19 76; Whitehead, 19 20). 84 The principle is as. follows: no object/ person, or event exists without a context. We thus see different things under different circumstances (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 153). How is this possible? For the immediately perceiving person (in the prereflective mode) things change, objects change, the world changes. To clarify, it is necessary to take a very small but tortuous philosoph ical interlude. It has been the standard formulation ever since persons were "doing philosophy," that appearances were to be distinguished from reality. This is the position ever since Plato on through Kant. Kant held that that which one perceives is only the appearance, but never the real thing in itself. The phenomenologist addresses this gap and its possible dissolution, and the Humanistic Existentialist extends the closing of the gap (between the appearance and the reality of the thing) via the inclusion of the intersubjective nature of consciousness (of which more later). The existentialist holds that there is and that there was a world before anyone may have been aware of it. Thus, what of appearances? This is how the argument Was spelled out by Sartre (195 6): What it is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is. The phenom enon can be studied and described as such for it is absolutely indicative of itself. (Sartre] 1956, p~ . xlvi) 85 The person is conscious of real things which are related to the person in a special way: contextually, intentionally. To hold that one is in the presence of any real object in the world, is to hold also that that object has certain aspects; aspects which are not available to consciousness at this immediate moment. But in the lived, immediate, pre-reflective world, the world of perception and feeling, individual appearances are those aspects themselves. The person apprehends an aspect of a real thing. That, to the person at the immediate moment, is the thing which the person sees. It is it. "I shall observe closely with vigilance, or I shall not attend." The appearance (we might say, the perception) of a thing does not, however, exhaust, empty, the possibility of many, perhaps even an infinite array of appearances which are aspects of the real thing in question. Depending on the person*s situation (context), the thing presents a different aspect: the object appears to change; better, the object in the prereflective (immediate) mode, in fact, changes (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1964, 1963). Our theory of the phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the objectivity of the phenomenon and that it has based this on an appeal to infinity [of .aspects]. The reality of that cup is that it is there and that it is not me. . . .the series of its 86 appearances is bound by a principle which does not depend on my whim. (Sartre, 1956, p. lvii) How does this work in the human sphere? When a patient expresses a subjective complaint about the self— not about the body, others, or about the environment, the patient retroflexively withdraws from an authentic being-in-the world position and creates the self into a pure subject. That maneuver is the magical retroflexive transformation (foundationally inauthentic) which is the hallmark of personal difficulty. A child, a naive subject, complains about the others in his world, about things, about events— that person does not withdraw from the world. Van den Berg put it well when he wrote that a person who is ill experiences things in a different way, "to be different yonder, to live in another, maybe hardly different, maybe completely different world" (.1972, p. 45) . The person who is depressed sees the world as dark and gloomy, things do not taste as they did before, people are uninteresting, the person's favorite "toys" do not attract any more as they did--somehow they have changed. The patient is ill? this means that his world is ill, literally that his objects are ill, however unusual this may sound. The psychiatric patient tells what his. world looks like, he states without mistakes, what he is like. (Van den Berg, 19 72, p. 4 6; compare this view to that posited by Boss, 1979, Ch. 3) 87 Van den Berg, the author of many works on phenomen ology and therapy,further implies the basic proposition put forth in Humanistic Existentialist psychotherapy, that violation is the central ensickening act (Ofman, 19 76) by stating that the judgment of relatives and friends about the changed world of the person is most usually a criticism, a condemnation of him. And the doctor joins in this condemnation by his lexicon of symptoms and labels which are mainly a dictionary of rejection: The patient consists of mistakes, of distortions, of projections, of hallucinations, of regressions, of conversions, identifications with aggressors, fusion delusions, trans ferences, denials, repressions, etc. Is all this not related to the times in which the psychiatric patient was condemned and confined? No doubt . . . . But the patient lives just as positively as we do. (Van den Berg, 1972, p. 47) And now comes a crucial therapeutic issue— how shall the doctor (physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, etc.) understand the person who reports that the world and the people in it, the objects and things in it, have changed? Is the doctor going to further engage in the very process which brought the person to the place where he is by further violation, or can the doctor affirm the person’s reality (sane -maki ng), - -a nd how to do so? 88 Much depends upon how the doctor interprets the fact that the person's objects change. If the doctor holds to the quotidian "scientific" notion of the world of scientific explanation--the non-human world, then an attempt will be made to reflectively, objectively, closely i-nspect--via the second look--the patient's world, and little will be seen. This doctor will not apprehend the change, the different world of the patient, will objectify that patient and state that the patient is "paranoid," distorting, or projecting. (But., there will be difficulty in explaining what projection means.') The doctor thus disconfirms (violates) the person's perception (■Ofman, 1976, 1980)r rejects (does not accept the patient as the patient is) and further promulgates an already weakened self-confidence and reality sense (Laing, 196 5, 1967, 1971; Laing & Esterson, 1965; Blount, 1977; Boss, 19 79). By this tack, the doctor echoes the provocative violating act which has led the person to the position in which the patient finds himself or herself. In the phenomenologically-based, intentionality- based, Humanistic Existentialist mode, the doctor will not necessarily require the closer observation based on the reflective mode, on the second look, the removed, objec tive, analytic, intellective mode. That second look 89 position is not the immediate lived-world position— importantly, it is not how the patient operates. The therapist in the Humanistic Existentialist mode is interested in the person as the person is; the primary interest is in the phenomena as they are. Thus there will be an acceptance and a respect for that which the person reports— the events as they are happening. There is respect for the observations of the person, the "seeings" of the person, not because it is therapeutic, but because they are true.1 One may, if one wishes, take a reflective, second look approach to an incident or perception; but let it be noted that such an approach disturbs the objects and events of the person, and that approach places both the doctor and the person in a different mode— an intellective, removed mode. Thus, the reflective, analytic mode reduced things to a stance wherein events and objects are apprehended without feelings and without emotions. That way of being is reserved for the laboratory, not the consulting room, the living room, or the bedroom. "Therefore, those who look closely [the second look] see other matters" (Van den Berg, 19 72, p. 63). The intentionality-based therapist or doctor remains true to the facts as they are happening-— to the facts of human, lived experience. 90 One can see that under certain conditions of "objective" or scientific observation, so-called competent observers (and by that is meant that the observers share a common contextual situation, an agreement to limit observations to a particular——reflective, analytic— manner of reporting events.) will see the same object or event in the same way (largely). But that is, then, the context or the situation upon which they have agreed: the experimental context. That is a context in which condi tions are so arranged, controlled, and manipulated that the context guarantees the seeing of the same event (cf., for instance, Argyris,. 19 71; Zimbardo, 19 69a, 19 69b; Ofman, 1976; Chein, 1972). And that is the behavioristic fallacy--the self- fulfilling prophecy where the experimenter controls conditions in such a manner that only that which is desired to be seen is found. But everyday lived experience is not of that kind. One never, in the lived world, sees objects as "pure objects." "We see things within their context and in connection to ourselves," write the phenomenolegists (Van den Berg, 1972, p. 37) in a unitary manner which, may not be broken down. If one does not see the significance of an event, nothing is seen. In a deeper s.ens.e, we see our intentions. That is what it means to be human. 91 Without the world there is self ness, no person; without selfness, without the person, there is no world. . . .this quality of ;"my-ness" in the world is a fugitive structure, always present, a structure which I 1ive. The world is mine because it is haunted by possibilities, and the consciousness of each of these is a possible self-consciousness which JE am; it is these possibilities as such which give the world its unity and its meaning as the world. (Sartre, 1956, p. 104) Intersubjectivity There is need, at this point, of a further exten sion of the above position. Thus far, emphasis has been on the individual nature of experience and of conscious ness. There is an "amendment’ 1 needed to the notion expressed above that the conscious act is always intentional, that one is never simply conscious, but that one is aware of this thing or that event. Current think ing in the field makes the point that it is insufficient to state the above. That which is needed is that one is conscious of_ something as being something; and, the second is that that awareness, in addition to being intentional, is also symbolic. Thus the current con sensus holds that the person is not only conscious of something, but that the person is also aware of something as being not only fortthe person alone— but for us 1 92 Consciousness/ in addition to being intentional, then, is an inter sub je.ctivity, it is a "knowing-f or-us • " Why should that be so? It is noted that the very act of naming implies the requirement of a mutuality— a person who names something names for another. Sartre1s naming a cup a cup is merely, then, an intersubjective occurrence, since every symbolic formulation implies a real or posited other for whom that symbol is intended to have some meaning. One does not just cry, one cries "to" someone, "for" someone, or "about" someone. We are, it seems, incurably bound to the world and to each other in a dyadic circuit. Consciousness and intersubjectivity are seen to be inextricably related; they are in fact aspects of the same new orientation .toward the world, the symbolic orientation. (Percy, 1975, p. 274) Retroflexion: The Science of Loneliness In seeking to understand a person, then, the Humanistic Existentialist approach would be to ask the person to describe the immediate world in an immediate, non-analytic manner. The analytic stance— the "after thought" or the "second look"— disrupts the existential truth. "Do not try to analyze your own inner experience" (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 204). 93 More often than not, the second look is an accom modation to the demands of a new context {the therapist's, the doctor's, or the demands of an objective or scientific world)• In any case, the second.thought alters the immediate reality which the person experiences and lives. That reality must be believed by the doctor, not because it is beneficial or therapeutic for it to be believed, but because it is true, it is real, and it is the reality lived by the person. To contravene the reality of the person's vision or perception is called, in Humanistic Existential psychology, violation; and violation is seen as the central ensickening act (Ofman, 1976; Blount, 1977). It must be recalled that consciousness has no interiority. We are always conscious of something. We are thinking about something, we are not just angry (as the Gestalt therapists aver), we are angry at something or with someone. The child never says, "I feel anger" (only psychotherapists speak that way), the child says, "I don't like you," or, "go awayi" Shorn of the world, we create a world around us. That is how things seem to be. We are one, and in a strange sense, one with the world and perhaps even with the universe. With humans, "The 'organisms' implicated are no longer oriented pragmatically toward their environ ment, but ontologically as its co-knowers and 94 co-celebrants" (Percy, 1975, p. 272). The following, surprisingly from the doyen of modern physics, takes the above point even further: We have to deal in new and unfamiliar terms when we concern ourselves with the "beginning of time" and "the end of time." Does that mean that "mind" races backward into the beginning of things and forward to the end of it all, and through this route decides the structure of the universe? The universe gives birth to mind; but: mind gives meaning to the universe. In this coupling of mind and universe, do we have . . . a self-excited circuit? We have to cross out that old word "observer" and replace it by the new word "participator." In some strange sense the quantum principle tells us that we are dealing with a participat ory universe. (Wheeler, 1975,, p. 586, p. 2 87; compare this view with Prigogine, 1980) A brilliant writer, in therapy, said, When I >pull back, [retroflex], my feelings are torn away from their "natural habitat." I spin my own- web around things, so I have little left but my fantasies and my hallu cinations. I guess its my attempt to restore the torn object by hallu cinating it, but its all in my own hands . . . like when I cross-dress while I'm masturbating or making love even, I, I kinda rob my lady of her femaieness, and I own it— both parts — myself. I steal away part of her so that it is mine. And I am lonely, so lonely. The Cartesian model has taught the modern person to retroflex, to be torn away from objects and from the world, to tear the self and one's feelings away from their 95 "natural habitat": the world— and significantly, from the world of others. It has taught alienation, insulation, encapsulation and loneliness. It is that retroflexive position which is lived as illness. It is therefore very significant that the great modern phenomenological psychi atrist, J. H. Van den Berg (1972) calls psychopathology the science of loneliness. The Existential Correction The existential correction to the Cartesian dualism with its translation into psychology as a position based on the doubting of one's senses and one's perceptions, is the phenomenologically-based Humanistic Existentialist position's response to the basic question of, "What is Real?" The Humanistic Existential position is that the real is located in the raw, immediate, non-reflective experi ential world of the individual who is speaking. That lived, experienced world of the individual— the person's world— is something of which one must be exquisitely mindful. It is not to be violated via a priori judgments as to what is cause, what is effect, what is complex (thus needing to be "reduced"), as to what is "more fundamental" ("it is oedipal underneath it all, or maso chistic— even though you defend against the idea"), as in the following example: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 96 The first real therapeutic effort should be made to^confront the patient with his masochism, his self-defeating, self-destructive actions. No interpre tations or confrontations.should be made in the initial interview, except those which are tied directly to guilt and self-punishment. (Lewin, 1970, pp. 50-52) The Humanistic Existential position is that one can, if one but attends, see reality anytime one chooses to look. It is there in the phenomenally given world. That is the lived world, and it is the matrix of our existence. It is the only source of meaning and intelligibility available to the person. To "jump over" that world to a world "behind the scenes," results in the criticism of most of psychology available today: that in the plethora of facts, there is irrelevancy and confusion (Koch, 1964; Heidegger, 1962; Sanford, 1965; Royce, 1967; Koch, 1981). A jumping over of that reality leads to physiologizing, to a false technology— to a reductionistic illusion of technique (Barrett, 1979) where the person is made into a machine. Scientific psychology . . . is itself one of the most distinct contemporary descendants of Cartesianism. . . . B. F. Skinner . . . rejects all talk of mind, Cartesian or otherwise . . . behaviorism insists on the primacy of the computable and calculable as the real reality for science, assigning all other experience to the merely "sub jective"; from the very beginning this is a way of thinking that is dominated 97 by the drastic Cartesian bifurcation of the world into subject and object. • . • The culmination of the Cartesian epoch is marked of course by the dominance of technology. (Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970, pp. 176-177) The newer-determinism invokes a differ ent image? not the stars in their courses but a piece of man-made tech nology— the computer— -is the background against which this thinking moves. And the question on which the future of freedom hangs is whether we can simulate, the human mind completely in a computer. . . . The "mind-forged manacles" reappear in a different guise in the contemporary appeal to a "technology of behavior." (Barrett, 1979, pp. xiv-xv; cf. Prigogine, 1980, Ch. 9) A central therapeutic element here is as follows: that via the therapist or doctor, self-knowledge is illuminated by an explicitly aware and careful description of the objects, persons, and of the real things of the person's world. Humanistic Existential therapy emphasizes the point'that explicit awareness is the antidote to self- deception and insists upon this: that specificity is the essence of reality. The focus is upon careful and full description— as opposed to interpretation— of the person's reality of his deep subjectivity (cf. Poole, 1972). "Hypotheses emerge where the description of reality has been discontinued too soon" (Van den Berg, 1972, p. 124). The ubiquitous emphasis on feelings and emotions in treatment is in terms of their illuminating the person's world, not as foundational events in themselves,. 98 just as the acting body is seen as the point of contact between the world already given and the world coming to birth (Boss, 1979)— as such it illuminates at any instant, the manner in which the person exists in the world. It is all there to be seen if one but cares to look, "The facts that concern us," wrote Wittgenstein (1958) "lie open before us!" Again, for emphasis, if one but intends to look. The Intentional Existence of Our Lives (Reflective and Prereflective Modes) Thus far, some very central notions have been clarified: the concept of the person, phenomenologically seen, as one whose consciousness is a being-for-itself, containing no interiority and thus always intending— pointing to the world, "yonder." The person is a being-in-the-world, a co-celebrant and co-knower of it and the others in it. Intentionally, the person organizes:the world into that person's world. Importantly, that organization is prereflective. More needs to be said about the immediate, prereflective mode (as opposed to the "second look," the analytic stance, or the cognitive, reflective mode); what is this mode? It is closely connected to everything noted above: to the healing of the split between the object and the subject, to appearances and reality. 99 The former discussion addressed the fact that when we engage the things of the world, or others, they are "ours," we are co-knowers of them. This co-knowing occurs prereflectively, immediately, without a "free interval." The moment we are conscious of jLt, the world is already ordered, organized, according to our particular and fundamental intention. An analogy may be drawn here: just as existence precedes essence, the organization via intentionality precedes any aware reflection. To be in the world is to have already apprehended it according to our personal myth (fundamental project or intention). The instant that the "being-for-itself" exists, it is already related to the world because consciousness is a nothing ness, it is conscious of the world and the things in it— consciousness is impossible without its object. The person, again, exists in context, in situation— in the world. That is the meaning of the lived world, "my world," the world I speak of. The philosopher of language had an analogue: "a word has meaning only as part of a sentence" (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 24); "my own relation to my words is wholly different from other people's" (p. 192). "And how are these feelings manifested among us?— by the way we choose and value words" (p. 204). 100 And here again one must "back up" because of the Cartesian picture which .has held us captive, and there is great diff iculty getting outside of it because it lays in our very language, and "language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 48), One must look at passions, motives and emotions from this purview. In terms of motives one can say that "a person has motives" which make such and such an action highly probable. But the difficulty with that description (which lays ubiquitously in our language) is that the person is seen as "ruled" by arbitrary "forces" which exist in the mind— without a free participation. In terms of emotions, the Cartesian way of thinking tends to see them as "psychic forces" or states of arousal— in analogy to the Mental Apparatus, and its energy transformations. Though this is not the place to treat of emotions, one notes a funda mental principle here, the principle of Context which is central• The "constantly renewed act is not distinct from my being? it is a choice of myself in the world and by the same token, it is a discovery of the world" XSartre, 1956, p. 461). Both motives and emotions are related to an assess ment (determined intentionality) of one’s total situation — and one’s total situation is apprehended, "seen" in the 101 context of one's organizing fundamental project or .persona 1^myth Thus it is that the concept of intentionality provides the clinician with a very useful centripetal focus for dealing with persons. The clinician needs to ask, and help the person become explicitly aware of the answer to this question: "What do you intend in this situation, and in an overall sense?" This is another way of asking, "to what aspects of the world do you attend, what do you find meaningful, and— basically— who are you? Look at how you see things and how you do things— that is who you are. But that is not written in stone. You are free— though not easily— to change. Your suffering is inextricably related to the way you are now, you are suffering your life." It was proposed in this work that there are two basic modes of intending to attend to the world— the hypovigilant mode, and the hypervigilant mode. It was hypothesized that there is a basic, underlying intention which the person carries— an intention that is not "stimulus bound," but rather, a way in which the person intends to organize reality: to attend closely or to "fuzz-out." Each mode has its positive and its negative aspects. Objective reality is singularly ambiguous. Our assessment of it— our apprehension of it in that very 102 assessment— -is that which gives it meaning (Keen, 1970? Ofman, 1976). Conclusion: The Personal Myth The idea of a basic project, or overarching intentionality, a fundamental personal myth, is the matrix that can be helpful— in a non-atomistic but holistic way— in understanding the individual daily experiences of the person. Without such an understanding the person and the doctor are in a kind of random motion— responding centri- fugally to personal statements in a deterministic ("this caused that") fashion— and thus teaches that way of thinking about himself/herself— in a deterministic, Cartesian dualistic, atomistic and reductionistic way, the very way from which the person suffers. It is not enough for the psychologist to describe a particular subject as realizing his project in the mode of voluntary reflection; the psychologist must also be capable of releasing (versus imposing] to us the profound intention which makes the subject realize his project in the mode of volition rather than in a wholly different mode. (Sartre, 1956, p. 452) The idea of the personal myth also facilitates an understanding of the manner in which the person "feels" or "emotes," or is motivated, and the manner in which the past, present, and future are experienced. More than anything else, it helps one to understand this seminal 103 idea: that the body incarnates and illuminates that person's way of being-in-the-world and that person's being with others. The body is a living hieroglyph of one's personal myth. The implications of all the above— that we are co-knowers and co-celebrants of each other and of the world— is that there is a certain symmetryibetween us and others. Things are rarely in one person's hands alone. One patient, for instance, because of his controlling, retroflexive intentionality, used to think of himself as "very distant"— "that is why my parents kept away from me." The implication here was that "If I were different, then they would be closer to me and love me." But, as he carefully described his early life and his life with his lover now, he became explicitly aware that his parents were— symmetrically— very distant people themselves, as was his lover. The transaction between them was symmetrical. He could stop his hallucinations (they stopped) when he authentically entered the interpersonal world, a co-participant. He began to understand a funda mental principle, that: Neither is it all I, and Neither is it all you. An analyst-patient put it well when he said the following: I understand my "split" better now. I do not split my consciousness, but 104 here is a description of what happens. I understand now my good reasons for being afraid of close encounters, of intimacy. When I have an encounter with my wife, . . . then I build a wall between us, and I have then, an encounter with myself alone about her ^ and me. I play both sides of the chess board by myself. I do it alone, all in my head. Instead of her criticizing me, I do it. I criticize myself, put it all up in my head. No wonder I get head aches. But I would rather be alone. It is safeir that way. I decided a long time ago, that it would be that way for me . . . that I would place all my feelings in my head. The common event in psychotherapy— self-criticism — that which is called a harsh superego— is just such a shearing off from the world of bthers, a shearing of the world of its natural "due" and a shearing of others' natural due. Criticism belongs to the "other," it "is up to the other" to criticize me, in contrast to "You say you love me, but I deem (by myself) that you cannot, it is impossible for you (anyone) to love me." That is a break with the world, with others, a break in symmetry. It is the retroflexive posture where the other or the world is robbed of its natural order, its due. That person says, in effect: "I cannot stand reality to hurt me [and it shalli] . . . I would rather do it myself 1" Thus, self-deception is illustrated via the paradigm of an attempt to be an insular body whose relationship with the world is asymmetrical and broken— an attempt to be a 105 causa sui and with impunity. But there is a price: loneliness and feelings of isolation. The principle is this: Each time one breaks the natural symmetry of being- in-the-world or being-with-others one suffers internally. One becomes ill. To paraphrase Van den Berg1s (1972) provocative statement that psychopathology is the science of loneliness, one might say that retroflexion and its sequent loneliness is the recipe for psychopathology. Patients' own statements illustrate:. When I got breast cancer, I was with drawn, eating myself, feeding myself. I would let no one nourish me. I was eating myself up. I would not let them attack my body— not let anyone affect me. I would rather .do it myself. So I attacked me. Better me to me than them to me. And from a psychiatrist: I used to believe, I wanted to believe, that I was endogenously depressed, but now I can see— when I want to— that it is the events: in my life, my wife, my shitty friends, the way they are, that depress me. But that takes clear vision, I, have to see things clearly to see that. Suppression of vision is my depression. That is the way I have organized my life. To see clearly is painful. Whenever I opt to see clearly my depression seems to "go into remission" [laughs]• I am not sure I can stand it. In terms of a person's "why," the person's motives, it must be concluded from the foregoing that nothing in the external world alone is a sufficient "reason" in 106 itself; that the "cause" does not serve as a sufficient motive for an action. The cause, far from determining any action, is illuminated in and through the general intention of an action (Sartre, 1956). The cause, the motive and the goal are intertwined, and thus causes and motives only carry the weight which the personal myth and fundamental intention give them (Sartre, 1956; Morris, 1976). In sum, the world can only advise— and vaguely at that— and then only if one asks it pertinent questions, and those contextual questions are asked only in terms of the personal myth, the basic way in which the person engages the world. Different from the quotidian analytic (Freudian and Jungian) modes, the existence of universal symbols or meanings is denied, as is all reductionism, mechanistic causation acting upon or within the person. The Humanistic Existentialist is interested not in the establishment of universal symbolism, but rather in the mutual discovery, at each step of talking together, of a functioning symbol in this particular person and in this particular case under consideration and in connection to the personal myth which gives rise to the symbol. Crucial to this enterprise is the care taken in not imposing a: priori notions such as sexuality, eros, thana- tos, social'interest, various archetypes, collective unconscious myths, separation anxiety, etc. 107 Intentionality-based therapy is a way of illuminat ing the subjective choice via which each person— idio- graphically and "idiothetically" (Lamiell, 1981; Kenrick & Stringfield, 1980? Mischel, 1968) places the body in the world as the incantation and incarnation of that person's basic intentions. The above ideas are founded on the phenomenologic- ally-based Humanistic Existentialist conception of the unity and imminent translucency of the person to that person and to others (authentic self-declaration)• One can know— if one but demystifies oneself— what one is about. But one seems to need another in order to do this. The person and the body are one. The manner in which one "sees" the world— and words in it— are "of the person," not of the stimulus. And, analogously, events, illnesses, do not "attack" or "assault" the body; and the way in which persons are can be understood. A mass of literature has been reviewed, beginning with the Freudian background— from which all springs— and the concept of unconscious repression; also included has been the most recent evidence on the concept of the unconscious and Freudian dynamics. In addition, there has been a review of the experimental evidence which deals with the concept of perceptual defense: that is, the manner in which the person and the stimulus interact. 108 based upon personality dynamics (threat and defense); and finally, there was an introduction of the concept of intentionality as a possibly more parsimonious construct in helping to understand how it is that persons see or do not see stimuli in the world. But a final note remains. The Freudians denigrate the stimulus, laying emphasis upon the internal dynamics of the person, the behaviorists denigrate the person and are uncomfortable with the "black box" of personality and unconscious dynamics. The concept of intentionality leaves this idea (of where to lay the emphasis— inside the pelrson, or outside the person) squarely between the two. Intention ally, the person sees that which the person sees— or does not see. Again, there is no split between the problematic "objective world" of out there and the problematic "sub jective" world of "inside." The concept of intentionality points to an absolute unity between the two. The world is of and for the person. The world is personal and the world is human. However, the necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowledge. This is a necessary condition, for in my consciousness of being conscious of the table, it would then be consciousness of that table without consciousness of being so. In other words, it would be a conscious ness ignorant of itself, an unconscious — which is absurd. This is a sufficient 109 condition, for my being.conscious of that table suffices in fact for me to be conscious of it. That is of course not sufficient to permit me to affirm that this table exists in itself— but rather that it exists for me. (Sartre, 1956, p. lii) Further, Sartre clearly says it, thusly, when he wrote, "The world is human": The world is human. We can see the very particular position of conscious ness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being; that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree, that landscape— being and nothing else. I want to grasp this being and I no longer find anything but myself. . . . Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowledge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less than the absolute, remains strictly human. (Sartre, 1956, p. 218) The concept of intentionality, thus, does not lay emphasis upon the person, nor does it lay emphasis upon the stimulus. It lays emphasis upon the person-in-the- world, or for the purposes of this study, of the event- (stimulus)-for-the-person• A hidden or covert motive of this work— to tease out those variables which affect the "seeing" of an object— is to explore whether there is an independent variable within the person alone (anxiety, defense, etc.), which is operative in the absence of a meaningful stimulus 110 — a nonsense syllable. The data revealed surprising negative results. Summary and an Attempt at Integration As noted in the review of the literature, psychol ogists have been very interested in the concept of motivated selectivity (perceptual defense and vigilance). The research seemed to indicate that whether one is aware of it or not, one's internal motivational state seems to select how much processing one carries out on the visual scene. Personality theorists, especially the psychoanalytic school, hypothesized that stimulation capable of making the perceiver anxious or fearful will be blocked from awareness— or as the most modern experimenters call it: not selected for complete processing. This phenomenon has been called perceptual defense. Further, according to these theorists, stimulation that signals immediate danger is selected for processing— a phenomenon called perceptive vigilance. Therefore, only those unpleasant stimuli where danger is not immediate would be percep tually avoided. This psychoanalytic-based hypothesis has been difficult to test, but the experimental evidence showed that, at least in word-identification tasks, anxiety apparently slowed the perceiver's response and resulted in Ill more stimulus energy being required for the perceiver to complete an identification. It was noted that theories of perceptual defense created a paradox: How can one process something suffi ciently to know that it is anxiety-provoking* and at the same time, block it sufficiently so that one is not made unbearably anxious by it? It was noted that Erderlyi (1974) made the most serious effort to resolve this para dox via his concept of multiple levels of perceptual processing. This researcher, after summarizing the extensive literature, came to the conclusion that a per ceiver who is visually searching can learn enough about an object or event to know it is not what is sought and can reject it, without processing to the point of identification. Erderlyi suggested that, as in the experiments on target-searching tasks, the amount of processing carried out depends on the tasks and what they mean to the perceiver. Just as a perceiver may stop processing a target as soon as its relevance is deter mined, so may a perceiver stop processing an anxiety- producing or upsetting stimulus situation. Researchers coupled the levels-of-processing con cepts with the theory of selective bias; In this situa tion, at times, a great deal of information may be needed before its meaning or implication is perceived; at other 112 times, conclusions can be reached from a single item or glance. This variation is often caused by how consistent the information is with the perceiver*s set or expectancy. If the expectancy is confirmed, the perceiver is biased to accept the information without looking further. If the information is unexpected, the perceiver will look further before reaching a conclusion to the task. An important determinant of how much information one needs is its importance to the person. If something is potentially dangerous, only a few cues may place the person on alert even before the danger is fully identified. If the stimulus event is neutral, the person can seemingly "afford" to take the time for more processing. Thus, the amount of evidence a person needs can vary both as a function of the person's expectation about what is seen, and as a function of the importance or meaning the stimulus has for the person. One may now use both of these concepts— levels of processing, and selective bias— to avoid the paradox suggested by the concept of perceptual defense. For instance (following Erderlyi, 1974), the word who e, in which the fourth letter is absent or smudged, will usually be perceived as whose rather than whore simply because expectations tell the perceiver that the latter word occurs comparatively seldom in print, compared to 113 whose. If the word is really whore, however, partial processing may tell the perceiver that the stimulus is capable of producing anxiety and the person may therefore stop processing. Because processing was not completed, the word was not identified but only "felt" or classed as upsetting. This process, thus, raises the threshold for the unacceptable word or idea. The conclusion may be reached, then, that when one feelsuupset or uneasy without knowing why, the person has probably processed enough information to discover that the stimulus is upsetting, but has stopped processing (attending) before the stimulus has been exactly identified (the intention is not to see). This idea falls right in line with the Humanistic Existentialist notion of the necessity for explicit awareness and full description of the events in the person's field. t CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN .Purpose of the Study The purpose of the study was to frame hypotheses, and generate data which would assist in the determination of the relationship between anxiety and neuroticism and the ability to attend to neutral stimuli. The intention is to "tease out" the personality variable alone, if any such exists, without contamination by the stimulus variable• Importance of the Study In its central concern with the issue of the person*s ability to attend (as a function of personality characteristics) this study probed a significant dimension in general psychopathology and attempted to construct a functional relationship with concepts in Humanistic and Humanistic Existential psychology where the concept of "explicit awareness" is central. As such, the results of this study shed new and significant, albeit surprising, light on both the above-mentioned areas. 114 115 Research Question The central research question was as follows: What is the functional relationship between neurosis/ anxiety as measured by the Minnesota Multiphasic Person ality Inventory (MMPI) (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940, 1951) and the performance on a test of ability to attend to neutral stimuli (nonsense syllables) as determined by tachistocopically presented stimuli? Research Hypotheses Hypothesis 1 The relationship between neurosis/anxiety (as measured by the MMPI) and the ability to attend (as determined by a tachistocopically administered test of attention) is a curvilinear one. That is, high scoring subjects on neuroticism/anxiety fall on either extreme on measures of attention. Subhypothesis 1 The basic neurotic process results in one of two positions: la. A super-attentive (hypervigilant) "looking and listening" attitude, named here as "Type I awareness." lb. A non-attentive (hypovigilant) "ostrich effect" (suppressive) attitude, named here as "Type II awareness." 116 Hypothesis 2 There are two distinct MMPI profiles: One associ ated with Type I awareness, and another associated with Type II awareness. Method Subjects The subjects were 101 (32 males, 69 females) from introductory counseling classes at the University of Southern California. Instruments The measuring instrument used in the study was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI is generally accepted in the psychological literature as being the best available and most efficient of the multi-scale tests of personality functioning (Buros, 1972; Korchin, 1976). It also has the additional advantage of being amenable to group administration. Though the validity and reliability of the MMPI show mixed results, it is nevertheless one of the most highly respected and widely used personality tests in psychology (Korchin, 1976; Cronbach, 1960; Sundberg & Tyler, 1962). Apparatus A standard model tachistoscope (Model no. 12 321A) was unavailable from the Psychological Corporation, but a 117 comparable model was modified and constructed from a Kodak Carousel with a specifically designed shutter mechanism which was adjustable as to time of presentation. It should be noted that trial runs were accomplished for threshold visual acuity (symbols were recognized 50% of the time). The speed was approximately l/400th of a second. The Stimuli The stimuli consisted of 50 black-and-white trans parencies, one for each set of nonsense syllables. The nonsense syllables were CVC's of zero or very low associ ation value randomly selected from the list prepared by Hilgard (in Stevens, '1961, p. 544) . Procedure The subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One underwent tachistocopic presentation first, followed by administration of the MMPI. The second group had the order reversed. Both testing procedures were administered to the two groups as a whole. While one group was taking the MMPI, the other group was performing the attention task. The counterbalancing was done in order to balance out any order-effects. Both procedures were administered during regularly scheduled laboratory time. 118 In order to achieve .a more accurate measure of performance on the attention task and to avoid problems with individual presentation, various precautions were taken. Before testing began, group threshold was deter mined. The criteria used for the determination of the threshold was that level of presentation resulting in 50% of subjects able to correctly preceive 50% of the stimuli. The subjects used for the determination of threshold were drawn from other comparable classes. In order to control for an additional problem inherent in group testing pro cedures, the tachistoscopic presentation was conducted in two parts. The room in which the attention task was administered was divided into quadrants: 1 \ 2 3 ^ 4 At an intermission, those subjects seated in quadrant 1 were instructed to move to quadrant 4, and those in 2 to quadrant 3. Quadrants in the room were sectioned off by means of twine. The intent here was to control for extraneous effects such as visual angle and distortion. 119 Statistical Analysis The study was correlational. Therefore, the hypotheses were tested by means of the various statistical procedures available which are based on the correlation coefficient• Hypothesis 1/ that there is a curvilinear relation ship between neurosis/anxiety and performance on a measure of attention, was tested by means of the Correlation Ratio: Eta Squared— a measure of nonlinear correlation (Hays, 1973). Hypothesis 2 states that the curve will be such that subjects who score high on the anxiety measure (ANX) and on the Neurotic Triad (NT) will fall on the extremes of the hypothesized U-shaped curve which is descriptive of our attention variable. The subjects will score either high or low on the attention measure. Assumptions 1. The subjects have approximately the same base-rates on the MMPI as the population upon which the MMPI was normalized. 2. The test of attention performance is an adequate and generalizable measure of a person's capacity for and method of attending. 3. The assumptions underlying the use of the two correlation methods are not violated. There was no 120 reason to believe that this assumption was not met (Hays, 19 73) since "The analyses of variance and the correlation- ratio [eta] approach are equivalent procedures and lead to the same result" (Ferguson, 1976, p. 237). One may comment upon these assumptions in order to justify the use of the statistics selected. The distribution of the dependent variable in the population from which the sample was drawn was normal. Since the sample constituted a "large" sample (>30), one may assume it was normal. At any rate, for large samples such as this (N=101), there was no reason to suspect a departure from normality. Regarding homogeneity of variance, since moderate departures from homogeneity do not seriously affect the inferences from data, no transformations nor tests for this were performed. Again, the size of the sample mitigated the need for this procedure. As concerns additive nature of effects versus multiplicative, there was no reason to suspect that the effects of the factors on the total variation are not additive in nature. Thus, it may be stated that the statistics used in this work were quite appropriate to the analysis of the data generated in the experimental procedure. 121 The employment of group versus individual administration of the attention test did not seriously affect the results CHAPTER IV RESULTS The data from the sample of 101 subjects (32 males and 6 9 females) were .analyzed utilizing the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) Multiple Classifi cation Procedure. This is a sub-procedure of the SPSS "ANOVA" procedure. Such a procedure yields the "eta" statistic needed for. the analysis, and further supplies an accompanying F-test to determine the significance of the resulting "eta." "Eta squared" may then be computed squaring the eta statistic. The resulting eta squared is equivalent to the commonly known formula for eta squared, which is: 1 - (SS Within/SS total). The eta statistic is thus a measure of curvilinear relationship. That is, it is a curvilinear correlation coefficient. In addition, linear correlation coefficients (Pearson r) were calculated by the SPSS "CORR" program to indicate the relationship between the Neurotic Triad (NT) with Attention (TAT), and for the anxiety measure (ANX) with Attention (TAT)• 122 123 The results for the linear correlation analysis may be seen in Table 1. TABLE 1 Linear Correlation (Pearson r) N r P NT with TAT 101 .16 .058 (NS) ANX with TAT 101 .17 .049* * significant at the .05 level The eta squared analysis for TAT by NT yields an eta squared of .06. Table 2 describes the results of this analysis. TABLE 2 Curvilinear Analysis (eta squared) Source of Variation Sum of Squares Mean df Square F Siq. Main Effect 3764.007 6 627.334 1.413 0.218 Explained 3764.008 6 627.334 1.413 0.218 Residual 41740.367 94 444.046 Total 45504.375 100 455.044 As the table indicates, these,results were not significant at the .05 level. 124 To test the possibility that the variable of sex was a significant covariate, an analysis of covariance was performed, with sex as the covariate. The results sug gested that there was a significant difference between men and women as to how their respective TAT and NT scores covaried. To determine the nature of this differ ence, two additional eta analyses were performed: one for men only, and one for women only. Tabls 3, 4, and 5 reflect the results of these analyses. It may be seen that, although the relationship between the TAT and NT is significantly stronger for men than for women, neither relationship is significant in TABLE 3 Analysis of Covariance (TAT by NT, with sex) Sources of Variation Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig. Sex 1744.833 li 1744.833 4.037 0.047 Main Effects GP 3561.889 6 593.648 1.373 0.234 Explained 5306.723 7 758.103 1.754 0.106 Residual 40197.652 93 432.233 Total 45504.375 100 455.044 125 TABLE 4 Eta Analysis - Men Only Source of Variation Sum of Scruares df Mean Scruare F Sicr. Main Effects GP 3292.013 6 548.669 1.265 0.307 Explained 3292.016 6 548.669 1.265 0.307 Residual 11274.910 26 433.650 Total 14566.926 32 455.216 TABLE 5 ' Eta Analysis - Women Only Source of Variation Sum of Scruares df Mean Scruare F Sig. Main Effects GP 2043.607 6 340.601 0.765 0.600 Explained 2043.609 6 340.602 0.765 0.600 Residual 27149.047 61 445.066 Total 29129.656 67 435.711 itself. The covariance analysis also indicated that the main effect (eta coefficient) remains insignificant even though a significant variable's effect (sex) is accounted for. 126 So that these data may be understood more easily, they have been portrayed graphically by means of the Easyplot procedure supplied by the University CompuLing Center. Figure 1 portrays the relationship between TAT on the X axis, and ANX on the Y axis. This figure is overlaid upon a scattergram of the data (The Easyplot)• This plot is quite . . ’similar to the NT vs. TAT presentation (see Figure 2). It must be reiterated that the variance about the means for the NT-TAT relationship is too great for the relationship to be significant, yet the similarity between the relationship is apparent and, therefore, of some interest. The pattern expressed (ANX and TAT) is fairly clear. Those who are low on the attention measure tend to be lowest on the anxiety measure. Then, as attention rises, so does anxiety. But as attention continues upward, anxiety becomes lower, ANX levels off at a plateau which is higher than that of subjects who have low TAT scores. Thus, what was shown here was that there is a curve which describes the data in a statistically signifi cant manner, although it is not the curve which was hypothesized. It is also important to note that the curve described the data better than the linear correla tion (r, TAT, ANX)• The hypothesis was that those Neurotic Triad 66 '5 56.8H 61 . 79 o <a w u e+ y i . U i < r LZI Anxiety Index 17<*. 32. 176. 72 167.11 169 -5 1 o i <» o r Sector B Sector C Sector A SZl 129 persons high on the NT or ANX would be on either extreme of the TAT measure. This hypothesis was not supported. The present results were opposite from the relationship hypothesized. CHAPTER V DISCUSSION This section will be divided into a discussion of the results that were found, into a discussion of the results that were not found, into an interpretation of the findings, and into possible alternative hypotheses to the findings in terms of theory and practice. The Findings It will be recalled that the investigator hypothe sized a structure, described by a U-shaped curve, which would define hypovigilance (non-attentiveness) on one end of the curve, and hypervigilance (super-attentiveness) on the other end of the curve, both as a function of a person's dealing with anxiety. Further it was hypothe sized that such a curve existed, and that it would be significant. The findings indicated that such a significant curve did in fact exist (eta was significant), but that the curve hypothesized did in fact not exist in the data. 130 131 What does this mean? If one peruses Figure 2, there is a U-shaped curve (but turned upside down, as it were) which is significant, and which describes anxiety on one axis and attention on the other. The curve indicates that both low anxiety subjects and high anxiety subjects were almost equal in attentiveness. In other words, it appeared that low anxiety subjects (in Sector A) were least attentive. Further, high anxiety subjects (in Sector B) are medium attentive, and finally, medium anxiety subjects (in Sector C) are most attentive. Thus, low attentiveness = f (low anxiety), high attentiveness = f (medium anxiety), and medium attentive ness = f (high anxiety). The most significant finding was as follows.: that persons with high anxiety perform moderately well on the task of attending to neutral stimuli. Further, persons with low anxiety do significantly less well on their attention to neutral stimuli, and persons with moderate anxiety do very well on the attention task. The second hypothesis (that a curve does indeed exist) was confirmed, but it was not the curve which was hypothesized by the investigator. What do these data suggest? t Anxiety to a high degree permits of attentiveness to a moderate degree. Low anxiety is associated with low attentiveness, and 132 moderate anxiety is associated with very high attentive ness. Put in different language, the data suggested that people with high anxiety are able to attend to a moderate degree, while persons with low anxiety are not able to attend well, while persons with moderate anxiety are able to attend very well. A number of alternative hypotheses are available to explain the data generated. In terms of the population, it is quite possible that the sample population, 101 graduate students, are preselected as attenders. Anxiety or no, they could not have become graduate students if they "played the ostrich." The results could have been a function of a sampling bias. Further, it may be possible that one way in which this population "binds" its anxiety is by attending to school- related matters. This population may show a different pattern if tested on non-neutral stimuli. It must be remembered, also, that these subjects were tested in a "school" situation, a situation which permits of, for these sub jects, an optimum amount of success (they are, by default, in their element). In terms of the personality measure, it will be recalled that the measure of anxiety, and the neurotic triad, was the MMPI. It may be that the MMPI speaks of anxiety in a different way than the way in which the 133 clinician thinks about anxiety. First, the manner in which the analytically-oriented clinician thinks of anxiety, shall be outlined (this section should be con sidered in conjunction with the prior discussion on anxiety in the definitions section), then the basis for the MMPI's conception of anxiety shall be outlined. Anxiety as a Measure and as a Concept The analytically-oriented clinician conceives the biological helplessness of the human infant as bringing it necessarily into states of painfully high tension. These are states' where- the organism is flooded by amounts of excitation beyond its capacity to master, states which are called traumatic states (Freud, 1961). The pain of these unavoidable early traumatic states, still undifferentiated and therefore not yet identical with later definite affects, is the common root of different later affects called anxiety (Fenichel, 1945). The sensations of this primary anxiety, as Fenichel called it, can be seen partly as the way in which the tension makes itself felt, and partly as the perception of involuntary vegetative emergency discharges. Freud', according to Fenichel (1945), suggested that the act of being born might be considered an experience in which the syndrome of primary anxiety is established. This anxiety is created by external and 134 internal stimuli, still unmastered, and insofar as it is experienced as a conscious painful feeling, it is experi enced passively, as something that occurs to the ego and as something which has to be endured. In later life, experiences that are comparable to primary anxiety occur in persons who have to endure trau matic events. Uncontrollable spells of overwhelming anxiety, felt as something terrible that floods a helpless personality, form a typical symptom of traumatic neuroses. A similar type of anxiety is felt when sexual (and,perhaps also aggressive) excitementiis not permitted to take its normal course. Thus it becomes probable that traumatic anxiety or panic is dynamically the same thing as primary anxiety— the way in which an insufficiency of mastery, a state of being flooded with excitation, is passively and automatically felt. (Fenichel, 1945, pp. 42-43) With the onset of anticipatory imagination and the resultant planning of suitable later actions, the idea of danger arises. The judging ego declares that a situation that is not yet traumatic might become so. This judgment obviously sets up conditions that are similar to those created by traumatic situations themselves, but are much less intense. This structure is experienced by the ego as anxiety. However, this is a different feeling from the overwhelming original panic. Instead of an overwhelming anxiety, a more or less moderate fear is experienced, which is used as a signal or as a protective measure. 135 Sometimes, wrote the analysts, the expectations of danger, instead of precipitating a purposeful fear that might be used in order to avoid a potential dangerous situation, precipitates a traumatic state itself. The ego's judgment of "danger ahead" is followed by an over whelming state of panic; "the ego called forth something it cannot control" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 43). Thus the attempts at taming or neutralizing the anxiety failed, and the original panic recurs and overwhelms the ego. But the most fundamental anxiety is apparently connected with the person's physiological inability (which began when the person was an infant) to satisfy drives on its own. The first fear is the (wordless) fear of the experience of further traumatic states. "The idea that one's own instinctual demands might be dangerous (which is the ultimate basis of all psychoneuroses) is rooted in this fear" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 44). This, then, describes the development of anxiety. In chapter two of Freud's monumental work, Totem and Taboo (1958), he wrote, "The psychology of the neuroses taught us that when wish feelings undergo repres sion, their libido becomes transformed into anxiety" (p. 10). As can be seen, the concept of anxiety is one of the most central in psychoanalytic theory in general. Its 136 origins were outlined above, and it is postulated that it plays a crucial role in the development of the personality. Moreover, it is of central importance in the theory of neurosis, and psychosis, as well as in treatment. Essentially, that which causes material to be driven into the unconscious and kept there is anxiety. This was the message of his work. The Problem of Anxiety (1936), where Freud brought out the point that anxiety is a singular, inner signal of possible danger from within— a danger from the instinctual drives, hostilities, aggres sions, unbridled sexual impulses which the ego, which is the part of the personality in contact with outer reality, perceives as danger to itself and to social demands. Anxiety is thus a perception of-danger which holds the person in check. If, however, the unconscious feelings of what the danger is are not realistic— are fantasied, misconceived, misinterpreted, infantile, irrational— then the anxiety is very strong. Importantly, if the anxiety is very strong, the person*s ability to respond in a normal fashion is decreased, and the person becomes inhibited, constricted. Reason becomes chained to the irrational via this anxiety, and there is no freedom-to function creatively. One might therefore say that the ultimate goal of man's struggle toward mental health and freedom 137 is the establishment of the primacy of reason by way of learning to over come our anxieties— that is to say, not to control, harness and cover up our anxieties, but to resolve them through insight, knowledge and understanding. (Zilboorg, 1951, P. 2 4) The paradigm of anxiety, thus, is as follows: The ego perceives a danger from within or from without— from the possible flooding of impulse from within, or from possible loss of esteem or love from without. The ego represses as a function of this anxiety. Any hint, threre- fore, of a stimulus which has to do with the repressed nucleus, immediately arouses anxiety, and is denied. It is important to note that the repressed act, event or feeling becomes a nucleus or "complex" around which a whole spate of events is repressed. [Freud’s] view . . . was that when a repudiated idea is suppressed from consciousness, it forms the basis of a whole new group of ideas; it becomes in effect a nucleus around which all ideas and experiences that would "imply an acceptance of the incompat ible idea" subsequently collect. The entire complex of ideas will have to be suppressed if the ego's conception of itself is to be defended. [Yankelovich & Barrett, 1970, p. 22) The underlying construct for anxiety and the neurotic triad on the MMPI, by contrast, was explicated in the definitions section in Chapter 1. 138 In Terms of Philosophy and Theory — - ■ - i - ■* - -*• — - The Cartesian paradigm— to which most psychology is heir— posits a distinct bifurcation between the person and the stimulus, between the person ("in here") and the world ("out there"). This way of thinking supports a position wherein there are "neutral stimuli" such as nonsense syllables: stimuli that do not exist "in context." But existential and phenomenological thought does not permit of stimuli without context. Thus, the important question arises: What was the context in the experiment in this investigation? This question will be set aside for. subse quent discussion. Normal psychological theory posits a "state" of the person (anxiety, etc.) which is relatively independent of the context or of the stimulus. It must be admitted that this researcher fell into the Cartesian trap. The experiment was designed to test an independent variable (a state of the organism)— independent of the stimulus, without context. Again, Humanistic Existential ism and phenomenology do not permit such a retroflexive bifurcation. But fall in the researcher did. The attempt was to do that which most "normal science" (Kuhn, 1970) psychologists do: that is, rupture the'dyadic nature of reality. A duality was created: the person and the person*s state (anxiety) on the one hand, independently; 139 and the nature of the stimulus as an independent (of the person) entity on the other 'hand. It is not only that there is no such thing as a neutral stimulus, but that "neutral stimuli" are by definition "out there," distinct entities, separate from the person (as if reality can be known separate of the knower, in a nonparticipatory way) as a perceiver (cf. Van den Berg, 1972; Poole, 1972; Ofman & Benton, 1982; Wheeler, 1975; Boss,1979; Sartre, 1956;.and the discussion supra on intentionality) . If one is to, or seeks to, understand the person, one must do so in context: without rupturing the dyadic circuit of reality— the person-in- the-world. To attempt to rupture it (in order to "tease out” one side of it, for instance as was done in this work, and as most scientific investigation does) is to see one's own design, not that which one purports to be looking at or investigating. To seek to understand the person, ik to understand that person's world, in which case, the stimulus in question cannot be, and is not, "neutral." One cannot look at individual differences (e.g., differences in modes of attending, attentiveness, atten- tional style, etc.) out of context. The fact seems to be that even though one observes different patterns— that observation is a dialectical process— among different people (e.g., some more repressive or hypovigilant, others 140 more sensitized or hypervigilant), these ways of attending are always in terms of a stimulus--something "out there" that the person responds to in the light of his intention- ality and projects. Neither side of this dyad (subject- stimulus) in independent of the other. It is, instead, a dialectic. It is not true that man is unknow able, but only that he is still unknown and that we have not yet had at our disposal the proper instruments for learning to know him. To under stand man, we must develop "a philo sophical anthropology." The existing tools of the natural sciences . . . are not adequate. What is needed is a new kind of Reason . . . a dialecti cal Reason. . . . 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Asset Metadata

Creator Benton, Esther (author)

Core Title Attentiveness and awareness as a variable in psychopathology and therapy: The relationship between neurosis, anxiety and the ability to attend

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Psychology, clinical

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c26-497427

Unique identifier UC11245239

Identifier usctheses-c26-497427 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP24815.pdf

Dmrecord 497427

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Benton, Esther

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA