A single experience of respiratory paralysis can be used to establish a conditioned response (CR) to a hitherto neutral stimulus. Respiratory paralysis to those undergoing it is horrific but not painful. The CR does not extinguish but becomes stronger as time passes despite repeated extinction trials. The skeletal aspects of the response are more variable than the autonomic aspects and do not provide any constant stimulus input. The results do not fit an "anxiety-reduction" explanation for the inextinguishability of traumatically conditioned responses but suggest that these responses have characteristics not mediated by reinforcement.

No abstract

One of the obvious requirements of a clinical test which purports to assess any aspect of the impairment of behaviour is that of cross-validation; it should be able to discriminate between different groups of patients similar to those on which it was first standardized. This paper reports such cross-validation of a paired-associate learning test which Inglis (1959) has shown to discriminate between groups of elderly psychiatric patients with and without memory disorder.

No abstract