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The article discusses the effects of student visits on social behavior of regressed schizophrenic patients. The use of high school and college students in psychiatric and correctional settings has grown impressively in the past few years. Many fascinating accounts of the value of these programs for both patients and students have appeared in the literature. Most reports of such effects have been anecdotal or based on non-controlled clinical observations. Notable exceptions include a study that reported positive effects on the personalities of college student volunteers who visited hospitalized schizophrenic patients and a study that reported changes in self-esteem, anxiety and defensiveness in groups of pre- adolescent emotionally disturbed boys involved in a college student companionship program.

The article discusses anxiety, color preferences and sensory minimizing in college men and women. Individual differences in response to color have long been a fascinating subject of both clinical and experimental investigation. It has been proposed on the one hand that color preference is innately determined in man and little influenced by learning experience and, on the other, that color preference is clearly the result of learning. The history of psychological studies of the relationship between personality and color has been partially reviewed by Schaie who has also suggested that "chromatic colors represent in spectral order from red to purple, the full range of emotional expression from excited, uncontrolled, immediate and externalized impulse discharge (red), through calm stability (green) to internalized, yet disturbing and driving anxiety (purple)."

This article focuses on the trade-off strategy in community research. Most recently, some of the more sophisticated and highly organized low-income communities have developed a modus operandi with outside researchers. It is rooted in the very capitalistic system in which both the poor and the professional live. The human service professions have not been unresponsive to this emerging characteristic of low-income communities. Professional service programs involving low-income people as assistants to professionals and as links between the professional service and the recipients of these services are rapidly being developed. Traditionally, the researcher's approach to the community process has been objective, detached, silent-striving for invisibility. The researcher's model of work has been based on at least the following two values: maximizing the gathering of relevant data and minimizing the contamination of the processes being observed. The immediate objective of this strategy is to set up a symbiotic relationship between the two parties--researchers and the low-income community--which will result in mutual gain.

This article examines the personality test patterns of rehabilitation center alcoholics, psychiatric inpatients and normals. Many investigators have attempted to distinguish alcoholics from other abnormal and normal groups on the basis of responses to various MMPI scales. This study examined whether the psychological problems of the alcoholic can be further illuminated through an examination of aspects of personality not previously explored. Three groups of males were used as subjects: 65 alcoholics referred to Acton Rehabilitation Center by the courts, 42 hospitalized psychiatric patients from one ward of Brentwood Hospital, and 73 normals.

The article discusses autonomic reactivity in relation to the affective meaning of suicide. It is found that suicide note writers who subsequently committed suicide were far less explicit about their suicidal intentions than those who faked suicide notes. It appeared that the truly suicidal individual might be avoiding direct psychological confrontation of the self-destructive course of action in which he was about to engage. Keith-Spiegel compared nursing notes written within 24 hours prior to suicide with nursing notes of randomly selected control patients of the same age and diagnosis and found that more dysphoric psychological states were recorded for controls than for suicides.

The article discusses the effects of dependency and self-assertiveness of schizophrenic patients on susceptibility to group influence in perceptual tasks. In study's of the susceptibility of schizophrenic patients to group pressure, some apparently contradictory findings have been reported. Whereas Gill found schizophrenic patients less influenced by group pressure than normals, Schooler and Spohn reported that regressed schizophrenic patients were actually more responsive to their immediate social environment than normals.

The article discusses the reactions of chronic schizophrenic patients. The investigation was done to determine whether chronic schizophrenic patients are deviant with respect to ability to derive bipolar conceptual dimensions . A non-schizophrenic group was composed of four medical students and eight medical psychology and experimental psychology trainees. Since it seemed possible that level of performance on certain tasks of the experiment might be related to general intelligence level, to level of ability to think abstractly, or to level of intellectual impairment or deterioration, these relationships were investigated. It is conjectured that the behavior in certain situations which may seem to an observer to be confused or associated with loss of perceptual discriminability, may be causally associated in some instances with failure to grasp certain cogent meanings.

This article focuses on perception and judgment in psychiatric patients. In spite of the large number of studies that have been done concerning misperceptions of psychiatric patients, there has been a notable lack of research dealing with the abilities of patients to perceive their own health-sickness status or the health-sickness status of other patients with whom they interact. In the present study, seventeen patients in a psychiatric ward therapy group were ranked on a dimension of psychological health-sickness by those 14 patients who were present at a particular ward meeting.

This article examines the effects of mental hospital experiences on attitudes of teenage students toward mental illness. The study presents the implementation of a student volunteer program at a large neuropsychiatric facility and the effects of participating in such a program on student attitudes towards mental patients and the hospital. The subjects were 30 teenagers from a junior college taking an introductory course in psychology which required that each student volunteer three hours a week service in a psychiatric institution.

The article discusses opinions of mental illness among nursing personnel in a large mental hospital. Since the nursing personnel at the hospital represent the largest group of persons working directly with patients day and night, it is felt that their attitudes and opinions about mental patients, and about mental illness and treatment, contribute significantly to the therapeutic climate of the hospital ward, and might well vary with type of ward assignment as well as among the various levels of nursing personnel. Three levels of nursing personnel (psychiatric aides, licensed vocational nurses, and registered nurses) differed in mental illness ideology in terms of a humanistic-custodial dimension.