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TESTS OF THE EMOTIONS. 
Smwney L. Pressey, Indiana University. 
The past three or four years have witnessed an altogether extraordinary 
activity in work with “mental tests”. As a chief result. it is being realized 
that such tests are by no means as valuable as was once thought. It has 
frequently been stated that the most important single cause of delinquency 
and crime was feeble-mindedness. But a very careful investigator has 
recently published data (the most accurate of its kind so far) showing 
that the inmates of a certain state penitentiary average practically the 
same in intelligence as the general adult population. It was once supposed 
that most cases dependent upon charity showed a mental age below twelve 
and were to be considered feeble-minded. We now know that a ‘mental 
age” of twelve is only very slightly below average in mental development. 
The result is that feeble-mindedness is being used much less than formerly 
as an explanation of social difficulties, and that research workers are turn- 
ing more and more toward emotional and environmental factors in seeking 
an explanation for such social and economic mal-adjustment. And there is 
really a great deal being done, in a quiet way, in the attempt to measure the 
emotions. Se I want you to think of the scale, copies of which I have 
~ passed out to you, as by no means a bit of freak research, but as simply 
one of a number of efforts along this line. 
The first test consists. as you will see, of twenty-five lists such as: 
disgust fear sex suspicion aunt 
roar divorce dislike sidewalk wiggle 
naked snicker wonder spit fight 
failure home rotting snake hug 
prize gutter thunder breast insult 
The subjects are told first to go through the lists and cross out everything 
that is unpleasant to them. Then after they have done this, they are told 
to go through the lists again, and to draw a circle around the one word 
in each list which is most unpleasant to them. The words are arranged 
according to a definite scheme; there are five sets of words, a series of 
jokers and words chosen as unpleasant to four different types of morbid 
personality. The selection of words has been made on the basis of ex- 
tended experience in work with the insane and with delinquents . Back of 
the test is a large body of theory with regard to the neuroses; it is held 
by many writers that in such morbid conditions there is a marked increase 
in the tendency to emotionalize, and a tendency to transfer emotion from 
usual to unusual or associated objects. The test is scored with these two 
points in mind. First, the total number of words crossed out is counted. 
Then the scorer counts the number of times the subject has chosen an 
unusual word, in selecting the most unpleasant thing. 
The second test consists of twenty-five lists such as: 
BLOSSOM flame flower paralyzed red sew 
LAMP poor headache match dogs light 
BATH naked choke tree alone danger 
KING father baseball queen rights razor 
SLEEP grade ache fright tongue worry 
