The relationship of anxiety to the conditioned eyelid response.

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Abstract
The present experiment attempted to evaluate the hypothesis that the amount of conditioning exhibited in a defense conditioning situation is a direct function of the level of total effective drive. Two groups of 30 subjects each were chosen on the basis of extreme scores made on a test of manifest anxiety, those with high scores being the anxious (high drive) group, and those with low scores being the non-anxious (low drive) group. Both groups were run in a conditioned eyelid situation. During the course of the conditioning trials, differential instructions, designed to raise or to lower anxiety level, were administered, half of each group receiving anxiety-producing, and half anxiety-relieving instructions. The results indicate that the sub-groups receiving differential instructions did not differ in the amount of conditioning in the subsequent course of the training trials, showing that the instructions had little or no effect. The data from the anxious and non-anxious groups show that the anxious group was consistently superior in amount of conditioning throughout the course of the conditioning trials, the difference between the two groups being highly significant statistically. The data on resistance to extinction, obtained from 14 of the anxious and 14 of the non-anxious subjects,indicate that although the anxious group was higher in both measures of extinction, the difference between the two groups was in neither case significant. The results are interpreted to mean that such sources of drive as those employed in the present experiment combine in some manner to produce a total effective drive state, and that this value is a determiner of the strength of the conditioned response.

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