No abstract

This study tested parts of the hypothesis that voyeurism, exhibitionism, toucheurism and frotteurism, obscene telephone calling, and at least some cases of the preferential rape pattern are all based on the same disturbance. In Part One, a frequency count of patients referred for one of these activities who subsequently reported having engaged in others of this same class was in accord with the clinical impression that there is a high degree of concomitance among at least some of these activities. In Parts Two and Three, relative preference for anomalous vs. normal erotic interactions was assessed by monitoring penile volume changes during verbally presented descriptions of corresponding situations. Part Two demonstrated that patients who suffered from one of the disorders in question other than voyeurism and who denied voyeuristic activity or tendencies, nonetheless responded more to narratives describing voyeuristic situations than did controls. Part Three showed that exhibitionists who denied toucheuristic activity or tendencies responded more to toucheuristic stimuli than did controls.

The validity of the law of initial value (LIV), which predicts relationships between prestimulus level and phasic response, was evaluated for two cardiac measures, heart rate (HR) and electrocardiographic T‐wave amplitude (TWA). HR acceleration and TWA attenuation were produced in undergraduates by the performance of the backward digit span task. The between‐subjects correlations of prestimulus level with the magnitude of the phasic responses were significant, with signs opposite to that which would be predicted by the LIV. The within‐subjects prestimulus level‐phasic response correlations, however, were consistent with the LIV. It appears that individual differences in psychologically‐elicited phasic cardiac reactivity negate LIV predictions. These results emphasize the importance of sharply distinguishing the between‐ vs. within‐subjects formulations of the LIV, and are contrary to recent psychophysiology textbook accounts of the prestimulus level‐phasic response relationship for cardiac variables.

No abstract

Some investigators have suggested that irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) represents a physiologic expression of an affective disorder. This study investigated whether IBS patients differed in their self-schema from depressed patients. Self-schema refers to a cognitive framework of the individual's beliefs, attitudes, and self-perceptions which is stored in memory and which influences incoming information. The sample consisted of 21 IBS patients, 21 psychiatric outpatients with major depression (MD), and 19 normal controls. All groups were age matched. Subjects completed a structured psychiatric interview (Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) and a Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), in addition to a test of self-schema, which involved rating and recall of a variety of "depressed" and "nondepressed" content adjectives. Consistent with previous work on self-schema, the MD group recalled significantly more depressed adjectives rated under the self-referent task than the Control group (p less than 0.05) and, also, the IBS group (p less than 0.05). Most striking was the finding that a subgroup of IBS patients who met criteria for MD (43% of the sample) recalled significantly more self-referent nondepressed words (and less self-referent depressed words) than the MD group (p less than 0.05). In other words, IBS patients with MD do not view themselves as depressed. These findings suggest that while some IBS and depressed psychiatric outpatients may share depressive symptoms, these groups can be differentiated by their self-schema.