Adaptation and Conditioning of the Galvanic Skin Response in Psychiatric Patients

There is a considerable literature dealing with the relation of anxiety to conditioning performance in human subjects. When compared with normal subjects, those with marked anxiety have been observed to show more rapid conditioning and slower extinction of certain responses. Typical observations have been those of Taylor (17) concerning conditioned eyelid responses, and of Welch (20), and Bitterman and Holtzman (3), concerning the galvanic skin response. In contrast, Bindra et al. (2) found no difference in the conditioning of salivary responses between anxious and non-anxious subjects.