Further psychophysiological studies of retarded, neurotic, psychotic, and normal children.

Abstract

In an earlier preliminary study from this department, Wortis and Choi [9] compared the patterns of performance of normal, neurotic, and psychotic children with a motor conditional reflex test battery which they described. It was suggested at that time that the broad diagnostic categories tended to display certain characteristic disturbances of the Pavlovian parameters of higher nervous activity. Thus groups and subgroups might show signs of predominance of excitation, predominance of inhibition, or poor mobility of the nervous processes. The analysis was based on traditional Pavlovian inspection of the data. In the present study we try to approach the same problem with a new patient population, studied with more refined experimental procedures. Because of the complexity of the data, we have in the present as well as in a previous study found it advantageous to use computer calculations in a multivariate statistical analysis of the findings [10].