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123  `Playmate' Shows Problems
     In Studying the Emotions
     The Washington Post  Saturday, November 9, 1968

     The variety of people is a fascinating subject of observation and
comment.  It is also a very hopeful condition.

     We may or may not believe "The Territorial Imperative" about the
innate savagery of man, what Ashley Montagu calls the "Original Sin
Revisited."  The human predicament taken in the large, is a gloomy
mess.  Nevertheless we also know that the human experience includes
many admirable lives that inspire hope and emulation.  Our sense of
doom about "man" depends on which men we use for models.

     The study of human variety is becoming fashionable in science as
it has long been in literature, but our tools are still very 
primitive.  One large area of research concerns the effects of drugs
on emotional states.  Some simple psychological experiments reported
by Dr. Stuart Valins of the State University of New York at Stony
Brook in the journal of personality and Social Psychology illustrate
some of the fundamental difficulties in studying the way people 
respond to emotional stimuli.

     The emotional stimuli used by Dr. Valins were fairly innocuous --
pictures from playboy magazine.  The pictures were presented under
different conditions to college student subjects who were later 
questioned about which pictures they remembered most vividly and found
most appealing.

     Some subjects were exposed to a playback of their heartbeat
sound, or so they were told.  In fact, the playback was quite
artificial and was manipulated for slower or faster rates by the 
experimenter.  The outcome was that these subjects showed a consistent 
preference for the playboy pictures they have seen while the playback 
indicated a faster beat, a variation that few of them perceived during 
the experiment itself.  When questioned further, many of the subjects 
rationalized their choices in great detail, which can be imagined well
enough without being repeated here.

     For a control, a matching group was shown the same pictures and 
heard the same heartbeat sounds but was told that these were artificial
distractions, not to be confused with their own heart rate.  This
group's choices were not influenced by the sounds.

     The effect of emotional situations on heartbeat is common 
knowledge. These new experiments show the reverse effect and suggest 
that many people assimilate impressions about their internal reactions
as part of their emotional evaluation of a given situation.
(They ask their heart how they feel.)

     In further studies, Dr. Valins showed that this behavior occurred
in varying degrees, least of all in those people who scored as -
unemotional or borderline psychopathic by other psychological tests. 
This may help to clear up a seeming contradiction, for other work had -
suggested that such people showed the same range of physical response as
others to emotional stress (heart rate, sweating etc.), or perhaps
even an exaggerated reaction.  Dr. Valins suggests that low emotional
tone is related to the ability to ignore internal cues of human 
response like heart rate.

     Advertisers (and demagogues) have, of course, long been aware of
the use of coincidental emotion to imprint their products. This is,
after all, why they advertise in playboy, or sponsor TV programs that
focus on violence.  The conviction about "expanded consciousness"
voiced by many drug users has a similar ring.

     Drug researchers must be especially wary of these effects in
attempts to decide whether drugs like adrenalin have direct effects
on the brain.  On the other hand, we may now be less fussy about 
whether a drug that dampens palpitations of the heart is a useful 
tranquilizer, so long as it restores a sense of calm to the patient's
perceptions.
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