STUDYING CONTROLLED WORD ASSOCIATIONS 393 



6. Feeling and emotions. These are nouns actually denoting 

 the feelings and emotion themselves, such as love, anger, distress. 

 In this list were not included words having an emotional con- 

 notation, such as mistletoe. 



7. Abstracts. These have been partly discussed above. It 

 was decided to include not only the orthodox abstracts which 

 usually end in ity, hood, ness, but also that lower hierarchy of 

 abstracts including words like vogue, needs, and loss. 



8. Unclassified. Here were put the days, months, seasons, 

 sounds, diseases, weights and measures, collective nouns, direc- 

 tions of the compass, times of day, parts of speech, the sciences 

 and arts, and others. 



The result of this classification as indicated in table 5 shows 

 nothing. There is no greater variation in the average reaction 

 time for the eight classes of nouns for any given subject than 

 would be expected from the large variation in the number of 

 words per group. This of course was not controllable. This 

 uniformity may indicate that emotional disturbances, from what 

 ever cause the meaning of the word, its relative unfamiliarity, 

 etc. do not necessarily manifest themselves in an increased 

 reaction time but through some physiological mechanism other 

 than the vocal apparatus, such as respiration, heart rate, blood 

 pressure. This problem is already under investigation in this 

 laboratory. Certainly nothing was indicated by this laborious 

 classification to give any clue to a possible difference in types of 

 response according to the intrinsic nature of the stimulus noun. 

 Because of these negative findings it was decided not to compile 

 reaction tune results on the classification of adjectives. These 

 adjectives had already been classified under the same heads as 

 the nouns, the criterion of classification being the noun cognate 

 with the adjective. 



Results for the verb-object and verb-subject association 



The results for verbs in experiment I, given in table 6 are an- 

 alogous to those for adjectives and nouns. The reaction tune 

 for the verb-subject association is longer than for the verb-object 



