Analysis of Patterns of Response of Anxious and Non-Anxious Subjects to a Flickering Light

Abstract

Considerable evidence has accumulated to indicate that some relationship exists berween anxiety level and various indices of behavior in a flicker-fusion task. Krugman's early ( 4 ) finding of an inverse relationship between anxiety level and flicker-fusion threshold was later confirmed by Goldstone ( 2 ) who also found that anxious Ss were more variable in their performance. These findings have been conhmed more recently by Kubzansky ( 5 ) and by Jones ( 3 ) . The measures differentiating the highly anxious from the less anxious groups have been the traditional ones of psychophysics, namely, threshold and variability around the threshold. Since variability around the threshold has differentiated between groups, these studies with anxious Ss (2 ,3 ,5) have concerned themselves particularly with noting and reporting group variability. However, the measure of variability used in these studies fails to provide detailed descriptions of those behaviors of S which it supposedly reflects. It was felt that auxiliary measures would perhaps provide a further assessment of the psychological factors which produce the difference in variability in response around the threshold in different anxiety groups. It is, therefore, the purpose of this paper: ( a ) to attempt to identify, logically, the possible ways in which variability in patterns of response in the above nored studies involving a flicker-fusion task could be produced; and ( b ) to see whether measurements of these ways of producing variability would dllferentiate between high and low anxiety groups which are known to differ in their degree of variability in this task. An analysis of the differences berween high and low anxiety groups on these new measures might reveal more clearly the manner in which highly anxious Ss respond co make their performances characteristically different from those of the low anxiety group.