Scores on the 11 subtests of the Wechsler-Bellevue were obtained for 80 schizophrenics, 40 paretics, and 210 non-psychotic adults. Differences were found between schizophrenics and non-psychotics on 8 tests: information, comprehension, arithmetic reasoning, vocabulary, picture completion, picture arrangement, object assembly, and digit-symbol substitution. Vocabulary and digit-symbol substitution were found to differentiate between paretics and non-psychotics. "The only conclusion warrented is that certain tests of the scale are sensitive to whatever changes in the organism occur similarly in schizophrenia, general paresis, and increasing age."
UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN M OST contemporary behavior pathologists accept the proposition that psychotherapy is a variety of social learning. A few have gone further to demonstrate, through analogical reasoning, that current theories of learning can be applied to the behavioral change which constitutes psychotherapy [5,6,10,11, 12, 18]. The nature of this demonstration, as well as the extent to which it is carried out explicitly, depends in part upon the behavior pathologist's preferred level of theoretical description. It depends also upon the view of the treatment process which the therapist develops through the use of his own preferred therapeutic techniques.The therapist turned theorist, however, is likely to restrict his theoretical analysis to the social learning which occurs during the therapeutic hours. But learning which is equally significant occurs outside the therapist's office, between formal therapeutic sessions. Such learning continues, if therapy is successful, long after formal treatment is over. Both therapist and learning theorist may then properly ask: "How does successful therapy operate to stimulate social learning between sessions ?" "Why does the patient, after successful therapy is concluded, continue to handle new interpersonal situations in ways that are socially more mature and valid than the ways he developed before?" J Based on a paper presented as part of the symposium, "Learning and Psychotherapy," at the meetings of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, April 29, 1949.
Ai assumption is implicit in much of the work of clinicians who diagnose mental deficiency that the behavior of mentally deficient subjects is different qualitatively from that of normal subjects of like mental age. Ordinarily this assumption rests upon the informal observation that certain items on standardized scales of intelligence are either less difficult or more difficult for defectives than for normal subjects of equal mental level. The defective is generally considered to be superior in items depending upon rote memory, for example, or in items such as vocabulary or absurdities which might depend upon past experience and therefore upon chronological age.The validity of this assumption has ordinarily been examined through analyses of responses of normal and deficient subjects to standard test items. Numerous studies employing the 1916 Stanford-Binet Scale in this way have established the fact that certain items on the scale are either more or less difficult for defectives than for normals. The usual explanation of these differences has been in terms of the wider experience of the older defectives, al-* The authors wish to express their appreciation to Mrs. V. J. H.
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