SENSORY DEPRIVATION AND PERSONALITY CHANGE

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Abstract
Many investigators have reported positive beneficial changes in personality and mental functioning among psychiatric patients exposed to brief periods of sensory deprivation and social isolation. The present study investigated the effects produced in a group of hospitalized psychiatric patients receiving partial sensory deprivation and social isolation, contrasted with a control group receiving no deprivation, and with an experimental group of patients to whom individually prepared stimulus tape messages were presented under conditions of sensory deprivation and social isolation. Subjects in the experimental group (Group I) were exposed to 3 hours of deprivation during which they were presented individually prerecorded taped verbal messages aimed at facilitating insight, self-understanding, and self-acceptance. Pre-post personality changes were assessed by objective scores on the Interpersonal Check List and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Subjects in the other 2 groups were pretested and post-tested with the same 2 instruments. Group II was exposed to the same deprivation conditions as Group I, but no stimulus messages were presented. Group III, the control group, was tested and retested only. The number of significant differences between groups in measured pre-post changes was several times chance expectancy. Subjects in Group I showed more self-acceptance, their conceptions of the ideal person changing so as to become more like their own conscious self-descriptions. There was evidence of improved inner controls, less severe psychiatric symptomatology, and a reduction in defensiveness and repression after exposure to the experimental conditions. Subjects in Group II also showed statistically significant changes in "improved" directions, but the pattern of changes was different from Group I. While their conscious self-concepts altered positively, their conceptions of the ideal person remained unchanged. Although Group II showed evidence of greater dominance, enhanced ego strength, less depression, and an outer facade of increased personal adequacy when post-tested, increases on measures relecting conscious insight and self-understanding were less than in Group I, while tendencies to deny personal shortcomings became greater. Group III showed few significant changes, suggesting that the significant changes in the other 2 groups resulted from the 2 experimental conditions of sensory deprivation rather than from testing and retesting alone. The procedures used in this study and the results obtained were interpreted as illustrating practical ways in which mild conditions of sensory deprivation and social isolation might be utilized beneficially for psychiatric patients.

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