James M. Dabbs

CONTRIBUTION OF EMOTIONAL AND INSTRUMENTAL RESPONSE PROCESSES IN ADAPTATION TO SURGERY

Predispositional measures of anxiety, internal-external control, and situational measures of worry, fear, pain, speed of recovery, and doses of analgesics were obtained from 62 female surgical patients. Preoperative measures of fear and worry were (a) positively and linearly related to postoperative emotionality and (/>) unrelated to speed of postoperative recovery and doses of analgesics. Birth order (first and later) and manifest anxiety (high, medium, and low) affected emotionality. Later borns low in manifest anxiety were least emotional; later borns high in manifest anxiety and firstborns either high or low in manifest anxiety were most emotional. Internal-external control was associated with ability to influence care. Internals obtained more needed analgesics, and if they were also firstborn, they had longer hospital stays than externals. The evidence contradicts the hypothesis that preoperativc emotion is causally related to adaptive responses in this stressful situation. The data suggest that emotionality should lie treated as a response and that these responses and instrumental responses can be independent.

Experimenter Influence in a Conformity Situation

E in a conformity study varied his apparent status by dressing more or less informally and saying he was a student cook or a graduate school instructor. He minimized personal involvement by saying he had been hired by an outside organization to run the experiment. Ss conformed more to norms set by their peers when E was of higher status.

Social psychological factors in oral surgery under local anesthesia

Abstract In a study of the distress experienced by oral surgery patients, it was found that the best predictors of distress were the technical difficulty of the operation, the patients sensitivity to pain, and the patients fearfulness about what would happen. Surprisingly, the dentists personality and behavior had little impact on the patients distress.

Palmar sweating and control of danger

Palmar sweating was monitored on Ss faced with shocks over which they could exert varying control. Shocks were also varied so that some Ss could escape only after receiving shock and others could avoid shock entirely. Control-no control interacted with escape-avoidance, producing peaks in sweating when Ss could not control their escape and when they could control their avoidance. The peaks may reflect more arousal in these two conditions, or they may reflect arousal which is more localized in time.