CPYRGAjpproved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4 A second area of research which has had some heuristic value for parapsychological research concerns subliminal perception, or preconscious processing (Dixon, 1981). Comparisons of psi and subliminal perception have noted that "right hemisphere” processing facilitates subliminal perception (Roney-Dougal, 1981, 1986) - a Suggestion which has also been made for psi perception (e.g. Braud, 1975). This could suggest that "right hemisphere targets” such as music, pictures and other non-analytic targets might be preferable to “left-hemisphere” targets such as words and numbers. Another parallel between psi and subliminal perception is that emotive stimuli can evoke clear autonomic responses in the percipient in both cases (Roney-Dougal, 1986). Serena Roney-Dougal feels that the use of negative emotional targets is both morally and methodologically unsound, partly because some of her subjects reported unpleasant experiences while receiving target impressions and might psi-miss with this kind of target, and also because of the perceptual defence phenomenon seen in subliminal perception. Sondow, Braud & Barker (1981) considered that "defensive" Subjects might be likely to psi-miss with unpleasant targets, and devised an "Openness Questionnaire” to identify such subjects. They found no significant difference between the "openness" of receivers who psi-hit and those who psi-missed in a ganzfeld study. Unfortunately, no extensive description is made of the format of the questionnaire, or of whether or not it measures perceptual defensiveness as seen in subliminal perception or some other, unspecified, form of defensiveness. In perceptual defence, a person may raise his or her recognition threshold for a threatening or unpleasant stimulus - in other words, they perceive it less clearly. Roney-Dougal interprets this as being due to the person's desire or motivation not to perceive the threatening stimulus, a motivation which, she feels, may underlie psi-missing also. However, Dixon reports experiments which suggest that the perceptual defence effect, rather than representing the motivations of the experimental participant, is best explained in physiological terms: emotive stimuli cause changes in a person’s arousal level which in turn affect the sensitivity of the sensory receptors. Whatever the mechanism of the effect of emotional stimuli on recognition thresholds, it is clear that this effect is not uni-directional. One aspect of perceptual defence which, it seems, tends to be overlooked is sometimes called vigilance. While some people may raise their recognition thresholds to emotional stimuli, others may actually lower them (Brown, 1961; Dixon, 1981). Without digressing too much on the reasons for this apparent contradiction, it has been found that there is a correlation between personality-type and a person’s tendency to raise or lower his or her recognition threshold, with extroverts raising their thresholds, and introverts lowering them (Brown, 1961; Corcoran, 1965). This has some interesting implications for parapsychology. While Roney-Dougal felt that the raised recognition thresholds seen in perceptual defence might be linked with the psi-missing of her own subjects with negative emotional targets, other researchers have found the opposite (Delanoy, 1988), and the vigilance effect suggests that some parapsychological subjects could even psi-hit with unpleasant targets. Donn Byrne (1961, 1963, 1964) has developed a ner RED rOved EAP Ralgass SUOO/SS/OS : CARE PSe OO TBORbos IOUT 2S O°
CPYRGHT erate Rein LO NEE GU a SAP BE Koco | personal communication, 1988). Having looked at popular literature, spontaneous cases, and theoretical suggestions from parapsychologists on what might make a good target, | will now make some inferences from areas of psychology which | consider to be relevant to this discussion. | (1) EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO STIMULI Mehrabian and Russell (1974) outline a theoretical approach to environmental psychology (the study of the impact of the physical and social environment on man's emotions, attitudes and behaviour). In their own words, "Evidence suggests that there are three basic emotional responses (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) (the dominance-submissiveness dimension refers to the degree of control, which individuals feel they have over a situation or environment), combinations of which can be used to describe adequately any emotional state (e.g. anxiety). By considering their impacts on these basic emotional dimensions, the effects of diverse stimulus components within or across sense modalities (@.g. color, pitch, texture, temperature) can be readily compared” (preface, Mehrabian & Russell, 1974, [my italics}). There is evidence of considerable intermodality of human response to stimulation - that is, stimulation in one sensory modality may affect perception in another. For instance, people who visualize auditory stimulation tend to sore in associating colour names and mood adjectives with types of music: “Such persons were found to visualize exciting music in bright forms or sharp and angular figures, and slow music in rounder forms” ( p. 11, Mehrabian & Russell, 1974). The three basic emotional responses to stimuli reported above (pleasure, arousal and dominance) are seen as providing a measure with which to compare people's varied intermodal responses to stimull. This is relevant because it suggests that an additional important aspect to. our consideration of what might be expected to be salient features of a GESP target is not only the actual physical characteristics of the target, but also the emotional response (a combination of pleasure, arousal and dominance) which that target elicits in the percipient. Further, the theory may provide a methodological framework for the consideration of the impact of various target characteristics on our experimental participants (Delanoy, personal communication, 1988). A semantic differential scale is used to measure people's emotional state in particular settings, or to measure their characteristic emotions over time. Mehrabian and Russell’s scale comprises 18 adjective pairs describing various aspects of pleasure, arousal and do inance, and their subjects are asked to mark on the scale the degree to which one or other of the adjective pair most accurately reflects their feelings. Semantic differential scales have already been used in parapsychology, though for different purposes than suggested here. McBain et al (1970) used Osgood’s Semantic Differential to find pairs of people with common affective reactions to the same concept, though, contrary to their expectations, they found no relation between the degree to which people agreed in their reactions to the target stimulus and their GESP scores with that stimulus. Sondow, Braud & Barker 254 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4
CPYRG : Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4 (1981) used Osgood’s Semantic Differential as one of several measures of target picture emotionality. However, it should be possible to make more extensive use of the semantic differential, and it is planned to investigate further how a scale such as Mehrabian & Russell's could be adapted to measure the reactions of Parapsycholagical subjects to targets and to provide a method to standardise descriptions of successful targets. The second aspect of Mehrabian and Russell's theory of environmental psychology which may be relevant to our discussion about targets is their consideration of how emotional reactions to physical environmental stimuli are related to the concept of approach-avoidance. This they define broadly as including *... physical movement toward, or away from, an environment. or stimulus, degree of attention, exploration...favourable attitudes such as...preference or liking...” (p.96, Mehrabian & Russell, 1974). Arousal is seen as a mediator of approach-avoidance behaviour. A literature review suggests that approach-avoidance is an inverted-U-shaped function of arousal: an organism seeks an optimum level of arousal - whether or not it approaches or avoids a stimulus depends on how arousing the stimulus is, and extremely high or low levels of arousal are avoided. In animals, there is a tendency to explore the unfamiliar. When the stimuli are fear-inducing, animals repeatedly withdraw and approach the stimuli. Mehrabian and Russell note that the animals are maintaining an optimum level of arousal with this behaviour. Similar behaviour is seen in human children and adults (for references see Mehrabian & Russell, 1974; Berlyne, 1960). Anecdotally, humans do seem to have a penchant for voluntarily and repeatedly exposing themselves to negative emotive and fear-inducing stimuli - hair-raising roller coaster rides and horror films, for example. The idea of approach-avoidance being mediated by arousal relates to the consideration above (re perceptual defence and vigilance) of the merits of using negative emotive targets in parapsychology. It suggests that psople might have some attraction to negative emotive targets insofar as these targets tend to increase arousal. Too much arousal, however, will cause people to withdraw from an unpleasant target. On the other hand the use of neutral and bland GESP targets is unlikely to arouse our experimental participants at all, consequently failing to elicit approach. Of course, positive emotive targets would also be expected to influence he arousal of our subjects and to elicit approach-avoidance behaviour. \ second area of psychological research which may make suggestions relevant to the question of what makes a good GESP target concerns the characteristics of stimuli hich attract people's attention. 2) STUDIES OF ATTENTION hile the theory discussed in the preceding section Suggested that stimuli could be Hescribed in terms of people's basic emotional responses to them, other research has examined characteristics of the stimuli themselves, to see what Stimulus features tend Prac BRTOVSE FAP RB AaS JoRtIBaltis PUHPeD Po senerabreoboreceseerttunn prove 255
PSYCAR BGA P FSP REAS aSe GU OUTS /OBKNCHMRISPIEIGEFBOR relevant to the discussion here as it could suggest the kind o might attract the attention of our experimental percipients in tasks. Berlyne (1970) noted the difficulty of even defining what is “attention”. conflict and arousal he seems to use an operational definition. typically presented the subject simultaneously with several sti percipient's eye fixation movements - the inference being that the stimulus which attracted most eye fixation (e.g. Be experiments used a different measure of attention, allowin themselves to very brief sights of stimulus pictures as many i 6O99N601 May be target features which free-response GESP meant by the word in his series of experiments (described in Berlyne, 1960) on curiosity, These experiments uli and observed the attention was given to yne, 1958). Other subjects to expose times as they liked - presumably attention was attracted by the stimuli which were chosen to be seen most often by subjects. The characteristics of stimuli which seemed to influence direction of attention included: intensity; brightness; contrast; colour; navelty; complexity; and incongruity. Intensity. Berlyne (1960) states that the intensity of stimulation is seen in "the frequency of nerve impulses and the number of fibers activated” (p.170) in the reticular arousal system. Generally, large stimuli are more intense than small stimuli; “warm” colours (e.g. red) are more intense and arousing than “cold" colours (@.g. blue); high-frequency sounds are more intense than low frequency sounds; and (in cats and monkeys) painful stimuli are most intense, followed by proprioceptive, auditory, and visual stimull respectively. Berlyne found that attention was attracted by relatively intense stimuli - for example, to larger than to smaller circles; to brighter than to dimmer visual stimull. Intensity is related to brightness, which also appears to attract attention. at black and white Colour. Infants preferred looking at colour to lookin stimuli. Adults’ attention was attracted more to a coloured stimulus than to a white one (Berlyne, 1960). Contrast. It was found that attention was attracted to! a lighter stimulus on black and medium grey backgrounds, and to a darker stimulus on a white background. So, contrast with the background attracted attention. Above we saw that brightness also attracts attention. When presenting subjects with stimuli which differed from. their background to equal extents but in different directions, it was found that subjects were more likely to respond to the lighter stimulus - that is, in the absence of a contrast difference, brightness was a secondary determinant of attention (McDonnell, 1968). Novelty. This can be defined as an unusual combination of parts of various objects, or a change from the kind of stimulus to which the organism has recently been exposed (Stotland & Canon, 1972). It has repeatedly been found that novel stimuli attract more attention than familiar stimuli (e.g. Langer, Fiske, Taylor & Chanowitz, 1976; Berlyne, 1958), though the effect of novelty declines over time (perhaps as the subject habituates| to the stimulus and ApprovedFottRetéase 2000/08/08 : CRS4RDPY6-00789R003100120001-4