In our experiments with the galvanometer, my colleagues and I have obtained records on a sufficiently large number of subjects to draw at least tentative conclusions and note tendencies and difficulties which may be suggestive to other experimenters. A number of papers1 have been published calling attention to differences in galvanic phenomena produced by patients with several types of mental defects. These studies are largely concerned with the variations in resistance to an external electric current or qualitative differences in galvanic deflections. Our work is largely concerned with the quantitative measurement of galvanic responses.
Instead of attempting to demonstrate the effectiveness of the galvanometer for the measurement of emotions, as was done in a previous paper,2 we are now interested in a comparison of the difference in affectivity of classified patients and normal subjects, and a study of individual patients and individual records.
TECHNIC
The apparatus consists of