Study of Association in Insanity | Page 3

to dark eight hundred
subjects gave one or another of the following seven words: _light, night,
black, color, room, bright, gloomy;_ while only two hundred gave
reactions other than these words; and only seventy subjects, out of the
total number of one thousand, gave reactions which were not given by
any other subject.
If any record obtained by this method be examined by referring to the
frequency tables, the reactions contained in it will fall into two classes:
the common reactions, those which are to be found in the tables, and the
individual reactions, those which are not to be found in the tables. For
the sake of accuracy, any reaction word which is not found in the table
in its identical form, but which is a grammatical variant of a word
found there, may be classed as
doubtful.
The value of any reaction may be expressed by the figure representing
the percentage of subjects who gave it. Thus the reaction,
_table--chair_, which was given by two hundred and sixty-seven out of
the total of our one thousand subjects, possesses a value of 26.7 per
cent. The significance of this value from the clinical standpoint will be
discussed later.

§ 4. NORMAL ASSOCIATIONAL TENDENCIES
The normal subjects gave, on the average. 6.8 per cent of individual
reactions, 1.5 per cent of doubtful ones, and 91.7 cent of common ones.
The range of variation was rather wide, a considerable number of

subjects giving no individual reactions at all, while a few gave over 30
per cent.[1]
[Footnote 1: In the study of the reactions furnished by our normal
subjects it was possible to analyze the record of any subject only by
removing it from the mass of material which forms our tables, and
using as the standard of comparison the reactions of the remaining 999
subjects.]
In order to determine the influence of age, sex, and education upon the
tendency to give reactions of various values, we have selected three
groups of subjects for special study: (1) one hundred persons of
collegiate or professional education; (2) one hundred persons of
common school education, employed in one of the State hospitals as
attendants, but not as trained nurses; and (3) seventy-eight children
under sixteen years of age. The reactions given by these subjects have
been classified according to frequency of occurrence into seven groups:
(a) individual reactions (value 0); (b) doubtful reactions (value ±); (c)
reactions given by one other person (value 0.1 per cent); (d) those given
by from two to five others (value 0.2--0.5 per cent); (e) those given by
from six to fifteen others (value 0.6-1.5 per cent); (f) those given by
from sixteen to one hundred others (value 1.6--10.0 per cent); and (g)
those given by more than one hundred others (value over 10.0 per cent).
The averages obtained from these groups of subjects are shown in
Table 1, and the figures for men and women are given separately.
TABLE I
Value of reaction 0 ± 0.1 0.2-0.5 0.6-1.5 1.6-10 >10 Sex Number % %
% % % % % of cases
Persons of M.. 60 9.2 1.8 5.2 9.7 11.0 27.8 85.5 collegiate F... 40 9.5
1.8 8.0 9.8 11.7 28.0 83.4 education Both 100 9.3 1.8 4.7 8.7 11.8 28.2
34.4 Persons of M.. 50 5.8 1.6 8.6 8.3 10.2 81.6 88.7 common school F..
50 4.6 1.8 8.8 7.1 9.4 82.0 42.1 education Both 100 5.2 1.4 3.5 7.7 9.8
81.8 40.4 School children M... 33 5.9 0.8 4.2 8.7 10.0 28.6 88.5 under
16 Jr. F.. 45 5.0 1.0 4.6 9.8 11.0 80.1 36.7 years of age Both 78 5.7 1.4
4.6 9.8 11.2 29.4 87.4 General average. Both.1000 6.8 1.5
It will be observed that the proportion of individual reactions given by
the subjects of collegiate education is slightly above the general
average for all subjects, while that of each of the other classes is below
the general average. In view, however, of the wide limits of variation,

among the thousand subjects, these deviations from the general average
are no larger than might quite possibly occur by chance, and the
number of cases in each group is so small that the conclusion that
education tends to increase the number of individual reactions would
hardly be justified.
It will be observed also that this comparative study does not show any
considerable differences corresponding to age or sex.
With regard to the type of reaction, it is possible to select groups of
records which present more or less consistently one of the following
special tendencies: (1) the tendency to react by contrasts; (2) the
tendency to react by synonyms or other defining terms; and (3) the
tendency to react by qualifying or specifying terms. How clearly the
selected groups show these tendencies is indicated by Table