This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Stimulus-Response and Individual-Response Specificity in Essential Hypertensives

BERNARD T. ENGEL, Ph.D.; ARTHUR F. BICKFORD, M.D.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1961;5(5):478-489.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Introduction

This paper is the second in a series dealing with the phenomena of physiological response stereotypy in psychosomatic patients. The first paper (Engel, 1960) reported that a group of normal subjects, when presented with several stimuli, will respond with a pattern of physiological responses which are in part a function of the evoking stimulus (stimulus-response or SR specificity), and in part a function of the responding individual (individual-response or IR specificity). In this paper we will extend these results and compare the response patterns of normal subjects to the response patterns of patients with "essential hypertension."

The importance of response-specificities for psychosomatic processes has been discussed by Alexander (1950). His theory of specificity—"physiological responses to emotional stimuli . . . vary according to the nature of the precipitating emotional state. . . . Every emotional state has its own physiological syndrome." (p. 68)—seems to acknowledge the existence . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
SAN FRANCISCO

Research was conducted at the Cardiovascular Research Institute, at the University of California Medical Center.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication April 21, 1961.

This research was supported in part by funds made available by Research Grant H-754 of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Public Health Service.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?