Anxiety and verbal conditioning.

Abstract
Male psychiatric patients were reinforced with "Good" for beginning sentences with I or WE. Scores on the Taylor MA scale defined patients' anxiety level. Awareness of correct and correlated response-reinforcement contingencies was evaluated by means of a detailed postconditioning interview. Performance gains on the conditioning task were determined primarily by aware Ss, whose increments in performance were specific to the pronoun for which they were aware of a reinforcement contingency. Unaware Ss did not differ from a randomly reinforced control group. Contrary to expectation, there was no relationship between anxiety and awareness. Aware high-anxiety patients gave significantly fewer I-WE sentences over trials than aware low-anxiety patients. (23 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

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