Being a kind of psychological defense, perceptual defense is one of the manifestations of the subject's interaction with the environment and is a way to protect a person from traumatic experiences, to protect from the perception of a threatening stimulus. In social psychology, during the period when J. Bruner developed the ideas of the New Look, the concept of perceptual defense was included in the problematics of social perception, in particular, in the problematics of the perception of a person by a person. Although the experimental data obtained in general psychology regarding the subconscious attempts of the subject of perception to “circumvent” the stimulus posing a threat were subjected to criteria, the idea was preserved in a modified form: as recognition of the role of motivation in the processes of social perception. In other words, in social psychology, perceptual defense can be considered as an attempt to ignore some features of another person during perception and thereby, as it were, build a barrier to his influence. Such a barrier can be built in relation to the entire group. In particular, another phenomenon described in social psychology, the so-called faith in a just world. Opened by M. Lerner, this phenomenon consists in the fact that a person tends to believe in the existence of a correspondence between what he does and what rewards or punishments follow. This seems to be fair. Accordingly, it is difficult for a person to believe in injustice; that something unpleasant can happen to him without any "guilt" on his part. A meeting with injustice turns on the mechanism of perceptual defense: a person is fenced off from information that destroys faith in a "fair world". The perception of another person is, as it were, built into this belief: anyone who threatens it is either not perceived at all, or is perceived selectively (the subject of perception sees in him only features that confirm the stability and “correctness” of the surrounding world and closes himself from the perception of other features). The situation in the group can be either favorable or unfavorable for belief in a "just world", and within each of those alternatives, expectations from the perception of group members will be formed differently. The peculiar form of perceptual defense that has arisen in this way also affects the nature of communication and interaction in the group.
The effect of "expectations"
It is implemented in implicit personality theories”, i.e. everyday ideas, more or less definitely existing in every person, regarding the connections between certain qualities of a person, regarding its structure, and sometimes also regarding the motives of behavior. Although in scientific psychology, despite the abundance of identified personality traits, no rigid connections between them have been established, in ordinary consciousness, at the level of common sense, these connections are often unconsciously fixed. The reasoning is based on the following model: if the evaluator is convinced that trait X always occurs together with trait Y, then observing trait X in an individual, the evaluator automatically ascribes trait Y to him (although in this particular case it may be absent). This arbitrary chaining of traits is called "illusory correlations." Unsubstantiated ideas about the obligatory linkage of certain qualities are born (“all pedantic people are suspicious”, “all cheerful people are frivolous”, etc.). Although the totality of such ideas about the universal, stable structure of personality can only be called "theories" in quotation marks, their practical significance does not diminish from this. All this acquires a special role in the situation of communication between people in a group. Here, “implicit theories of personality” that exist among different members of the group, do not agree, and sometimes contradict each other, collide, which can have a significant effect on the entire system of relationships and, above all, on the processes of communication. A person's perception of a communication partner based on a false expectation can lead to a feeling of discomfort that it will be followed by a complete refusal to communicate. Repeatedly repeated similar error will form a stable property - closeness in communication, i.e. there is a certain "communicative quality" of the individual. The conditionality of his general situation in the group must be specially investigated.
Perceptual protection - an attempt to ignore some features of another person during perception and thereby build a barrier to undesirable influence. The mechanism of perceptual defense can be the so-called belief in a just world. The effect of "expectations". These are ordinary ideas about the relationship of various personality traits. In a group, perceptions based on false expectations can lead to feelings of discomfort and withdrawal from communication. Ultimately, a stable communicative quality of a person can be formed - closeness in communication. Each of us, one way or another, highlights some and ignores other types of information. Learning style has two main dimensions: (1) the way information is collected and (2) the way information is evaluated and used. There are many means of assessing the various dimensions of cognitive style and learning specificity.
Cognitive style: - field independence - field dependence; Representatives of the field-dependent style trust visual impressions more when assessing what is happening and hardly overcome the visible field if it is necessary to detail and structure the situation. Representatives of the field-independent style, on the contrary, rely on internal experience and easily tune out from the influence of the field, quickly and accurately highlighting a detail from a holistic spatial situation. - concreteness - abstractness. Concreteness-abstractness is based on such psychological processes as differentiation and integration of concepts. - smoothing - sharpening. For “smoothers”, the preservation of material in memory is accompanied by its simplification, loss of details, loss of certain fragments. On the contrary, in the memory of the sharpeners, there is an emphasis, an emphasis on the specific details of the material to be remembered. - rigid - flexible cognitive control; - low - high tolerance for unrealistic experience. Tolerant subjects evaluate experience according to their actual characteristics, while intolerant subjects resist cognitive experience in which the initial data contradicts their existing knowledge. - focusing - scanning control. This cognitive style characterizes the individual features of the distribution of attention, which are manifested in the degree of breadth of coverage of various aspects of the displayed situation. - impulsiveness - reflectivity; - narrow - wide range of equivalence. Representatives of the pole of a narrow range of equivalence tend to focus on the differences of objects, paying attention mainly to their details and distinctive features. - cognitive simplicity - complexity. Some people understand and interpret what is happening in a simplified form based on fixing a limited set of information.
Instinct as a hereditarily fixed product of phylogenetic development
All animal behavior is "instinctive" in nature. Conscious behavior, which is expressed in a change in nature and is regulated on the basis of comprehension, awareness of essential connections, knowledge of patterns, foresight, is available only to humans; it is a product of history, formed in the course of the development of social and labor practices. All forms of the psyche and behavior of animals are built on the basis of biological forms of existence, being developed in the process of adaptation to the environment. In their motivation, they all proceed from unconscious, blindly operating biological needs. In instinctive actions, fixation due to lability prevails: they are characterized by relative stereotype; different individual acts of instinctive behavior in different individuals of the same species remain basically, as it were, within the framework of one common structure. Instincts are usually understood further as actions or more or less complex acts of behavior that appear immediately, as if ready, regardless of training, from individual experience, being a hereditarily fixed product of phylogenetic development. Speaking of heredity, phylogenetic fixedness or innateness of an instinctive action, one must take into account that each specific act of behavior includes both hereditary and acquired components in unity and interpenetration. The development of behavioral forms that are the product of phylogenesis in each individual must also be mediated by his ontogeny. Thus, it is not necessary to externally oppose to each other what is hereditary in instinct and what is acquired in other forms of behavior. Within instinct itself there is a certain unity of these opposites with the dominance—in instinct—of the hereditary.
- Perceptual defense is the effect of the negative impact of a person's motivation on perception through an increase in the threshold of perception of a certain object by an individual, in which he does not notice stimuli that threaten his consciousness. In the course of perceptual defense, a person tries to build a barrier to the impact of unpleasant events, facts, and experiences.
Perceptual defense is one of the principles of perception selectivity formulated by J. Bruner and L. Postman, which also includes the principle of alertness (vigilance), which means that stimuli that threaten the integrity of the personality are recognized faster than others.
Related concepts
Self-perception theory is a formation assessment developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. He argues that people develop their relationship (when there is no prior relationship due to lack of experience, etc., and the emotional response is ambiguous) by observing their behavior and inferring which relationship should have caused it. The theory is non-competitive because conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behavior. In addition, the theory suggests that humans cause...
Egocentric distortion is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perception and/or have a higher opinion of oneself than one actually has. This appears to be the result of a psychological need to satisfy one's ego and be useful for memory consolidation. Research has shown that impressions, ideas, and beliefs are easier to remember when they match one's own, inducing an egocentric perspective. Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoli first identified this cognitive...
Heuristic affect is a subconscious process that manifests itself in the influence of emotions on the speed and efficiency of decision making. It allows you to make decisions without having to perform an extensive search for information and is used when reasoning about the risks and benefits of something, depending on the positive or negative feelings that a person associates with the subject in question.
Reactive resistance is a motivational state that occurs in a situation where some external condition (another person, a proposal, or a rule) restricts freedom or threatens to limit the manifestations of an individual. The main task of such behavior is the restoration of lost or limited freedom.
The Pollyanna principle is a psychological phenomenon according to which people tend to agree first of all with positive statements that apply to themselves. This phenomenon has much in common with the Barnum effect, which may also be called the Forer effect. This effect, named after the famous American circus entrepreneur and showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, psychologically incorporates the Pollyanna principle.
The effect of the audience (the effect of Zayonts, the effect of facilitation) is the influence of outside presence on human behavior. This effect must be taken into account when conducting, for example, psychological research: the audience effect can be considered as one of the factors that threaten internal validity.
Confirmation bias, or confirmation bias, is a person's tendency to seek out and interpret such information or prefer information that is consistent with their point of view, belief, or hypothesis.
The two-factor theory of emotions is a socio-psychological theory that considers emotions as combinations of two components (factors): physiological arousal and a cognitive interpretation of this arousal.
In cognitive science, choice bias is the tendency to retroactively attribute positive qualities to the item or action that the person has chosen. This is a cognitive bias. What is remembered about a decision can be as important as the decisions themselves, especially in determining how much regret or satisfaction a person feels from the decision. Research shows that the process of making and remembering choices produces memories that tend to be distorted by the predictable...
Self-efficacy - belief in the effectiveness of one's own actions and the expectation of success from their implementation, one of the key concepts of Albert Bandura's social-cognitive theory of learning. General self-efficacy is made up of particular self-efficacy that exist in various areas of human activity. Closely related to self-efficacy is the concept of self-confidence.
Ego splitting (or simply splitting) is a psychological process related to psychological defense mechanisms, which can be briefly described as thinking “in black and white”, in other words, in terms of extremes: “good” or “bad”, “omnipotent” or “ helpless" etc.
Expectation violation theory is a communication theory that analyzes how people respond to unanticipated violations of social norms and expectations. The theory was developed by Judy K. Bergun in the late 1970s. Initially, Bergun analyzed people's expectations regarding personal distance when communicating with another person, as well as how the violation of such distance correlates with the attitude towards a particular person. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was called "the theory of violation of non-verbal expectations" and was based on ...
The Rosenthal effect or the Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon, which consists in the fact that a person's expectations of the realization of the prophecy largely determine the nature of his actions and the interpretation of the reactions of others, which provokes the self-fulfillment of the prophecy. This is one of the factors that threaten internal validity. It can manifest itself at any stage of research and in any science: both during the procedure of the experiment, and when processing the results, and when interpreting the results of the study, etc.
Psychological manipulation is a type of social influence or socio-psychological phenomenon, which is the desire to change the perception or behavior of other people using covert, deceptive and violent tactics.
The effect of acquaintance with an object is a psychological phenomenon of expressing sympathy for an object only on the basis of existing acquaintance with it. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes referred to as the familiarity principle. In the study of interpersonal attraction, it was found that the more often a person sees someone, the more pleasant and attractive this person seems to him.
Qualia (from Latin qualia (plural) - properties, qualities, quale (singular) - what kind or what kind) - a term used in philosophy, mainly in the English-language analytical philosophy of consciousness, to refer to sensory, sensual phenomena of any kind. Introduced by the American philosopher C. I. Lewis in 1929.
Prosocial behavior, or "voluntary behavior designed to benefit another person," is social behavior that "benefits other people or society as a whole." An example of prosocial behavior is helping, sharing, giving, collaborating, and volunteering. These actions may be motivated by empathy or concern for the welfare and rights of others, as well as selfish or practical considerations. Prosociality is very...
Deindividualization is a socio-psychological phenomenon that means the loss of one's own self, self-consciousness, because of which a person becomes more receptive to the norms of the crowd. Occurs in group situations that guarantee anonymity and do not focus on an individual. The term was coined by Leon Festinger, Albert Pepione and Theodore Newcomb in 1952.
Selective perception is the tendency of people to pay attention to those elements of the environment that are consistent with their expectations, and ignore the rest. An example of this phenomenon can be the selective perception of facts from news reports. This term is also used to characterize the behavior of all people when they tend to "look at things" only from their own personal position. Selective perception can refer to all cognitive biases in which expectations affect perception. Human...
Hindsight bias (English hindsight bias; spelling “hindsight” is common in Russian-language literature) (other names: the phenomenon “I knew it from the very beginning” / “I knew it” / “So I knew it!” (Eng. I- knew-it-all-along), hindsight, retrospective determinism, retrospective distortion) is the tendency to perceive events that have already happened, or facts that have already been established, as obvious and predictable, despite the lack of sufficient initial information for. ..
The availability heuristic is an intuitive process in which a person "judges the frequency or possibility of an event by the ease with which examples or cases come to mind," i.e., are easier to remember. In such an evaluation, one relies on a limited number of examples or cases. This simplifies the complex task of assessing the likelihood and predicting the significance of an event to simple judgments based on one's own memories, so such a process is biased ...
Anxiety is a negatively colored emotion expressing a feeling of uncertainty, the expectation of negative events, and hard-to-define forebodings. Unlike the causes of fear, the causes of anxiety are usually not recognized, but it prevents a person from engaging in potentially harmful behavior, or prompts him to act to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome. Anxiety is associated with the subconscious mobilization of the body's mental forces to overcome a potentially dangerous situation.
The false uniqueness effect is a psychological phenomenon that consists in the tendency of an individual to underestimate the prevalence among other individuals of the abilities and desirable or successful behavior characteristic of him.
Social proof (eng. Social proof), or informational social influence (eng. informational social influence) - a psychological phenomenon that occurs when some people cannot determine the preferred way of behavior in difficult situations. Assuming that others are more familiar with the situation, such people consider their behavior to be preferable. This phenomenon is often used to deliberately manipulate the behavior of others.
Stage fright (fear of public speaking, fear of the audience) is a pathological fear of speaking in public. It is one of the most common social fears. Symptoms of stage fright are palpitations, sweating, voice tremors, tremors of the lips and limbs, tightness of the vocal cords, nausea, etc. In some cases, stage fright can be part of more general psychological problems (phobias), but many people experience stage fright, not possessing any other psychological ...
Holding therapy (eng. hold - “hold”, “hold”) is a method, the essence of which is the treatment by holding. Used by parents to help establish contact between a parent and a child diagnosed with autism. His invention is credited to Martha Welch, “the doctor who founded the New York Mother Center.” Critics of holding therapy call the method shock, compare it to negative reinforcement, in fact, to punishment. There is concern that holding may cause discomfort in the child ...
The identifiable victim effect is a type of cognitive bias in which there is a tendency among people to provide more generous assistance to an individual (victim) whose difficult life circumstances can be directly observed than to an unspecified group of people with similar problems. By a similar principle, this effect is also observed when assigning a greater measure of responsibility to the offender, whose identity has been established, even if his identity does not carry any significant ...
The spotlight effect is a psychological effect that consists in the tendency to overestimate how much a person's actions and appearance are noticeable to others.
Gender stereotypes are ideas that are widespread in society about the characteristics and behavior of representatives of different genders, primarily men and women. Gender stereotypes are closely related to existing gender roles in a given society and serve to maintain and reproduce them. In particular, gender stereotypes contribute to the maintenance of gender inequality.
Stereotyping (from “stereotype”) is the perception, classification and evaluation of objects, events, individuals by extending to them the characteristics of a social group or social phenomena based on certain ideas, developed stereotypes. Based on general psychological mechanisms, stereotyping is a complex socio-psychological phenomenon that performs such functions as: maintaining the identification of a person, group or phenomenon, justifying their possible negative ...
Model of the human psyche (eng. Theory of Mind (ToM). In the literature, you can find other translations of this term, for example: understanding of someone else's consciousness, theory of intentions, theory of consciousness, theory of mind, etc. (in the films "BBC "meets as a" theory of mind ") - a system of representations of mental phenomena (meta-representations), intensively developing in childhood. To have a model of a mental state means to be able to perceive as one's own experiences (belief ...
The framing effect (from the English frame, framing) is a cognitive distortion in which the form of information presentation affects its perception by a person. So, the same statement, depending on the wording and semantic accents, can be presented both in a negative and in a positive light (“The glass is half empty or half full”), as a benefit or a loss.
The phenomenon of bitter candy is a phenomenon that illustrates the first birth of a personality in ontogeny in accordance with the theory of personality by A. N. Leontiev. The phenomenon demonstrates that the success of solving a problem depends not only on its content, but, first of all, on the motive that forms the task for the child (the child needs to prove his right to receive the object by efforts that he could avoid). The phenomenon is observed in a specially created situation: a child is given a difficult task...
Affluenza is a term used by critics of consumerism to refer to the behavior in which a person works very hard and gets into debt in order to constantly increase their level of consumption. The term was first used in 1954, however, it became more deeply understood after the documentary film in 1997, and later with the release of the book “Consumerism. A disease that threatens the world (2001, revised 2005, 2014). These works define consumerism as "morbid, contagious...
Inattentional Blindness or Perceptual blindness (also often inaccurately translated as false blindness) is a psychological inability to pay attention to any object that does not relate to vision problems and is purely psychological in nature . The phenomenon can also be defined as the inability of an individual to see a stimulus that has suddenly appeared in the field of vision.
The sleeper effect is a psychological phenomenon associated with persuasion. This is the delayed rise in impact of a message that was accompanied by a devaluing stimulus (such as a counterargument or receiving the message from an untrustworthy source). The essence of the phenomenon is in the delayed separation of the content of the message and the source of information.
The vast minority (French: La minorité réprimant) is a series of experiments in social psychology conducted by the famous French psychologist Serge Moscovici in 1969, based on Asch's series of studies, but pursuing opposite results. The purpose of the experiments was to reveal the concept of the social influence of the active minority.
(German: Schweigespirale) is a concept in political science and mass communications proposed by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noel-Neumann. Asserts that a person is less likely to speak their mind on a topic if they feel they are in a minority because they fear retribution or isolation (ignorance). Elisabeth Noel-Neumann considers the “spiral of silence” an attribute of the manifestation of public opinion: “All manifestations of public opinion are united by their connection with the threat of isolation ...
Good (English good) is a special psychological and psychoanalytic term denoting a certain specific and tangible class of internal objects that, in the subject's mind, are favorably disposed towards him - as opposed to the constantly complementary class of objects - "bad", which are presented in relation to him malevolent, hostile or even dangerous.:222-223
Anti-natalism (ancient Greek ἀντί - "against", Latin natalis - "birth") - a range of philosophical and ethical positions that negatively evaluate reproduction and consider it unethical in certain situations, including a negative assessment of reproduction under any conditions (for example ., such is the position of the bioethical philosopher David Benatar). Anti-natalism must be distinguished from practical solutions to overpopulation and birth control policies, as well as childfree life choices, which are motivated primarily by...
The evil world coefficient is a term first coined by George Gerbner. He describes the phenomenon in which media content associated with cruelty and violence makes viewers think they live in a world that is more dangerous and violent than it really is.
Belief in a just world (English belief in a just world), or the hypothesis of a just world (English just-world hypothesis), or the phenomenon of a just world, is a socio-psychological phenomenon formulated by Melvin Lerner, expressed in the belief that the world is arranged fair, and people in life get what they deserve in accordance with their personal qualities and deeds: good people are rewarded, and bad people are punished.
Stereotype (from other Greek στερεός - solid + τύπος - imprint) - a mental assessment of something that has been previously formed by a person, which can be reflected in the corresponding stereotypical behavior.
Attachment theory is a psychological model that attempts to describe the dynamics of long-term and short-term interpersonal relationships. However, “attachment theory is not formulated as a general relationship theory. It only touches a certain facet of them”: how people react to pain in a relationship, for example, when loved ones are in danger or when they are separated from them. Essentially, attachment depends on a person's ability to develop basic trust in themselves and significant others. Newborns have attachment...
Deviancy amplification spiral is a term that refers to an increase in the number of media reports on the topic of a negative social phenomenon or other undesirable event, which contributes to inflating the real scale of this problem and leads to the creation of a moral panic in society.
The Leon Festinger experiment is a series of experiments in social psychology conducted by American psychologists Leon Festinger and James Merrill Carlsmith in 1956 and described in detail in the article Cognitive consequences of forced compliance // J. Abnorm Soc Psychol., 1959).
The online disinhibition effect is the effect of weakening the psychological barriers that restrict the release of hidden feelings and needs, which makes people behave online in a way that they usually do not act in real life. This attenuation depends on a variety of factors, including: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchrony, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, power minimization, and the user's personality. Effect...
Perception - perception, direct reflection of things in consciousness through the senses.
The concept of perceptual protection is closely related to the context. A person can build a defense (blocking or refusal to recognize) against a stimulus or events in a context that is personally or morally unacceptable or threatening to him.
Although there are some points of contention, most studies support the existence of a perceptual defense mechanism. Researchers describe how perceptual defenses kick in when people are confronted with inconsistent facts with previously formed ideas. In this study, college students were given the word "intelligent" as a description of a factory worker. This was contrary to the students' idea of factory workers, and they formed the defense in the following ways.
1. Denial. Some denied the existence of intellectuality among factory workers.
2. Modification and distortion. They were one of the most common forms of protection. The defense scheme was to avoid conflict of perception by attaching some other characteristic to the word "intelligent", for example: "He is intelligent, but does not have the initiative to rise above his surroundings."
3. Change in perception. The characteristic "intellectuality" changed the perception of workers in many students. The changes, however, were, as a rule, of a very minor nature, namely, the expression "he is a joke" turned into "he is witty."
4. Acceptance but refusal to change. Very few of the students studied explicitly acknowledged the conflict between their perceptions of the worker and the descriptions of intellectuality presented to them. So, one of them said: "Apparently ... most of the factory workers that I heard about are not distinguished by high intelligence."
These studies can be summarized into three explanations for perceptual defense.
1. Emotionally significant information has a higher perception threshold (i.e., we do not readily perceive it) than information of a neutral or non-disturbing nature. For this reason, events are seen differently by those who are not personally involved in them and by those who participate in them. Alarm signals are often overlooked by those most affected by the trouble.
2. Unpleasant information and stimuli can recognize the appearance of a substitute perception distorted to prevent the need to acknowledge negative information. So, a manager may believe that workers are quite satisfied while they are annoyed. Later, when the strike begins, the manager cannot accept the fact that the "happy" workers are voluntarily participating in it. He concludes that they were also the victim of some agitators, and that things are still going well at the plant as a whole.
3. Information that is important to a person actually generates emotions, but these emotions can be distorted and redirected. When a person feels that “they are holding him for an “idiot” at the top, he finds relief and a replacement for his emotions in kicking a cat or taking revenge on a subordinate.
Such research results help to understand why some people in the organization, especially foremen and workers, have some kind of “blind spots”. They simply “do not see” certain events or situations or stubbornly misinterpret them.
Perceptual protection consists in raising the threshold of perception for signals coming from outside, the emotional charge of which is difficult to bear; it is a way of avoiding the anxiety that might arise if we were aware that there was some thought or action in us that could lead to punishment, guilt, or feelings of inferiority. Effective defense helps to avoid anxiety by distorting or canceling awareness of the underlying conflict.
Perception threshold is closely related to the level of brain activity. In an awake and attentive individual, it may be lowered to facilitate the receipt and decoding of signals. But it can be increased during falling asleep in some other states of consciousness, when the flow of information is filtered and perception is weakened.
The brain of even a fully awake person is able to change the threshold at any moment: it all depends on whether the information received is important to him or not. This happens when messages come in from the outside, the emotional charge of which is difficult to bear. To learn an ordinary short word, on average, a tenth of a second is enough, but for a taboo word, you need to double, and sometimes triple this time.
Knowledge about the work of the brain allows us to put forward a number of hypotheses in this regard. One of them concerns the first level of memory - sensory memory. The mechanism by which signals are stored at the receptor level for a very short time until it is decided whether to transfer them from here to short-term memory or not. This decision depends on a higher, cognitive level, where the censorship that Freud spoke about can operate.
All signals that are not allowed into consciousness by censorship are obviously processed by some more primitive system at the preconscious level. They may constitute a reserve source of spontaneous images and free associations - and thus, in turn, play a role in the activation of the organism. This can manifest itself, for example, in dreams, in lightning flashes of intuition or, in conditions of sensory isolation.
· The phenomenon of perceptual defense is not too strong and universal; in different people it manifests itself with different strength.
· When presented with stimuli relating to emotionally significant areas, the subjects show a tendency to either emphasize or distort perception.
Perceptual defense is characteristic of people characterized by a general tendency to use the mechanisms of repression and denial
Experiments
McGinnies E. conducted an experiment aimed at testing the position that people "repel" unpleasant events from themselves, literally trying to close their eyes to what they do not want to see. He chose a group of socially taboo words (obscene words) and a group of neutral words acceptable for presentation on a tachistoscope to a group of college students (male and female). McGinnis chose taboo words because they reflect psychosexual problems that are not customary to mention in polite society.
The subjects had to recognize the words as quickly as possible, and as soon as they recognized, tell McGinnis what they saw on the tachistoscope. McGinnis also measured the galvanic skin response of the subjects simultaneously with the beginning of the presentation of word stimuli. This reaction is essentially an indicator of the electrical conductivity of the skin, and it increases with increased sweating, which is usually considered as a manifestation of emotional arousal or anxiety.
McGinnis got amazing results. Correct recognition of taboo words not only required a longer presentation time on the tachistoscope, but also increased sweating when presented with taboo words for a period too short for the subjects to visually recognize. On presentation of neutral words, there was no such increase in perspiration prior to conscious recognition of the word. During the experiment, McGinnis established three main facts:
recognition of taboo words requires a longer exposure;
GSR at these words was greater;
subjects thought they recognized taboo words as quickly as other words.
Thus, it turned out that emotionally significant words are more difficult to recognize than neutral ones, and these difficulties may not be recognized by the subject. These data were recognized by McGinnis as experimental confirmation of the phenomenon of perceptual defense. He considered that the longer time to recognize taboo words is a manifestation of perceptual defense, and the increased sweating that accompanies attempts to read a word before it is recognized is not only a manifestation of the active nature of the defense process, but also an unconscious manifestation of anxiety caused by these words. Discoveries related to increased sweating allowed McGinnis to say that the body somehow reacts to taboo words and that this nascent emotional reaction is part of the process of exclusion from awareness.
Objections to McGuinness' results were raised by Howes and Solomon. First of all, they drew attention to the fact that, according to the theory of perception, the time of recognition of a word depends on the frequency of its use in the language. Taboo words appear in print, no doubt, less frequently (or not at all), while neutral words occur frequently, and this difference will affect the ease (time) of word recognition. This idea was experimentally confirmed: for the control experiment, Postman and his collaborators chose the equally frequently used words taboo and neutral words (based on the frequency dictionary of the English language). In this case, it turned out that the time of recognition of taboo words did not differ from the time of recognition of neutral words.
Based on these data, the researchers could not resolve the controversy definitively. McGinnis repeated his experiment, this time choosing words with the same frequency of use and using as subjects, in addition to normal people, also mentally ill. In this experiment, McGinnis again found differences in word recognition times. They were clearly manifested in patients; in normal subjects, they were significantly less than in the previous study.
