Relationship between levels of arousal and responsiveness among schizophrenic and normal subjects.

Electrodermal and heart‐rate measurements in chronic and partially remitted schizophrenic patients

“…Nor did we find any concomitant psychophysiological differences between patients who failed to respond and those who did respond, as reported by these authors, although higher spontaneous activity was noted in normal subjects who responded to the tones compared with those who did not. Thayer & Silber (1971) reported that the responderhon-responder dichotomy did exist in both schizophrenics and normals, but was related to arousal level and not patient or control status. Similar bimodal distributions were reported several years ago for depressed patients and correlated with agitation and depression (Lader & Wing (1969)).…”

The electrodermal orienting response to auditive stimuli in autistic children, normal children, mentally retarded children, and child psychiatric patients

“…The number of spontaneous fluctuations in skin conductance level can be considered to be an activation index of the electrodermal system (Depue & Fowles, 1976), and recently several investigators (Bohlin, 1973;Thayer & Silber, 1971;Bundy & Fitzgerald, 1975;Edelberg & Muller, 1981;Venables & Fletcher, 1981) have found that in normal subjects amplitude as well as recovery rate of the skin conductance response covary with the number of spontaneous fluctuations in conductance. One can wonder whether this covariance between the activation level of the electrodermal system and the electrodermal responsiveness is the same for normal subjects as well as for subjects suffering from severe psychopathology.…”

Psychophysiological and Neurophysiological Aspects of Schizophrenia

“…The findings of Howe (1958) could be due to the fact that an insufficient time was allowed for resting skin conductance reading (3-5 min compared to the 10-15 min usually allotted). The reports of Thayer & Silber (1971) and Zahn (1964) on the significance of attention for GSR responding also indicated the possibility that the tone used as a conditional stimulus was lacking in attention value. It is more difficult to account for the finding of Astrup (1962) and Astrup & FlekkljJy (1969).…”

“…In the literature since 1950, only three studies (Gunderson (1953), Churchill (1957), Whatmore & Ellis (1958» have compared the autonomic resting states of normals and schizophrenics. The rest have applied pain stimuli alone (Pain tal (1951» or in combination with other kinds of stimuli, such as rapid discrimination and mirror drawing (Malmo et al (1951», psychiatric interview and insulin injection (Ax et al (1962», verbal stimulation (Astrup & Flekk¢y (1969, Reynolds (1963», and tones in a conditioning paradigm (Howe (1958), Ax et al (1970». A number of studies have avoided the use of aversive stimulation and instead used movie viewing, association test and serial seven (Williams (1953» or sound or light stimulation (Zahn (1964, Goldstein (1965), Zahn et al (1968), Thayer & Silber (1971), , Magaro (1973». Preceding the stimulation, there are usually rest periods, during which the basal levels of the dependent variables are assessed.…”

“…I do not think that the results of Thayer & Silber (1971) -essentially corroborated by Pain tal (1951) -weaken this conlusion. In an especially well-controlled study, Thayer & Silber (1971) demonstrated that if normals and schizophrenics (mostly chronic) are matched on the basis of their resting skin resistance level (the reciprocal of conductance level), their electrodermal responses to discrete tone stimuli became essentially equal. This shows that latency, number and amplitude of GSR's are dependent on the initial skin conductance values.…”