No abstract

THERE have been many reports describing meaningful relationships between electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns and psychological phenomena in individuals with no known neurological dysfunction (9, 12). However, the findings are not completely consistent, nor is there agreement among workers in the field about the reliability of many of these relationships. This lack of agreement is particularly evident among those who have tried to correlate brain wave patterns with personality and with psychological disorders. Such a situation is not surprising in view of the clinical, rather than experimental, approach that has characterized most of these studies. Clinical appraisal of personality, normal or abnormal, and clinical evaluation of EEG records are both subject to many unknown sources of variability, and generalizations based on unreliable data are likely to be tenuous.The present study is concerned with the area of personality. It is part of a larger research project designed to apply more refined methods of psychological and electroencephalographic analysis to the relation between brain wave patterns and psychological variables, in the hope that such methods may yield reliable data which will be productive of testable hypotheses and permit comparison with the results of other relevant studies.In the study of a complex phenomenon such as personality, it is tempting to isolate its discrete components and deal with them one at iParts of this paper were read at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, June 1954, at Montreal, Quebec, and at the Annual Meeting of the American E.E.G. Society, June 1954, at Atlantic City. The research reported here was aided by a Federal Mental Health Grant and by the Mental Health Service of the Province of British Columbia. The authors wish to express their appreciation to the great number of individuals who assisted in this project, including those who agreed to be subjects for the control series and for the study of prison inmates.