Introduction
The use of broad, scanning research tools which attempt to correlate multiple psychologic and physiologic factors often disguises relationships which might be discernible by techniques intended to investigate specific links in a psychophysiologic chain of events. This paper will describe a preliminary attempt to utilize focused interviews as part of a psychophysiologic battery to evaluaate the responses of subjects to controlled stresses. We attempted to direct our efforts at evaluating specific affective states which might influence the subject's somatic stress responses. To do this, it was necessary to identify the physiologic changes possible when persons were exposed to various stressful situations, and then theorize on the psychodynamic factors which might be causally related to physiologic and biochemical variations influencing the subject's response.The problem to be investigated in this project was the relationship of emotional factors to tolerance to g forces. Pilots in high-speed aircraft and subjects on the