VARIATIONAL FACTOR IN HANDWRITING 147 



THE VARIATIONAL FACTOR IN HANDWRITING 



By JUNE E. DOWNEY 



UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING 



HANDWRITING, bearing as it does the cachet of individuality, 

 has always interested those to whom things human make their 

 intimate appeal. Curious observations relative to it have long been 

 current, the existence, for instance, of national as well as family and 

 personal chirographics; the perversions of it that take form as mirror- 

 writing or even — it is said — as inverted writing; the whimsy shown 

 by the bizarre characters, by the tendency to irrelevant and extravagant 

 flourishes in the writing of those suffering from certain forms of 

 mental disorder. Attention has been called to the similarity existing 

 between a man's handwriting and the manner in which he walks or 

 gesticulates. It has been claimed that age and sex and profession leave 

 their impress upon writing, that the pencraft of the painter mirrors 

 minutely the grace and distinction that marks the sweep of his brush 

 across the canvas. Carried out boldly such speculations venture even 

 the claim that the handwriting of any individual would be found to 

 resemble the characteristic tracings shown by his pulse and respiration 

 and fatigue curves. Nor is the interest in the variational aspect of 

 handwriting restricted to recording the diversities in penmanship from 

 individual to individual; it is also engaged in noting variations from 

 day to day in the handwriting of any given person under the influence 

 of fatigue or emotion or disease. But, however numerous, such observa- 

 tions and however legitimate the speculations they engender, it remains 

 for the physiologist and the psychologist, with the aid perhaps of the 

 sociologist, to compass the scientific study of the variational factor in 

 handwriting. 



The ground, however, has been broken. As has frequently been the 

 case in the history of research, the claims of a pseudo-science, at once 

 provocative and suggestive, have stimulated inquiry. In this case, 

 graphology, the art that would find in handwriting revelations of 

 intelligence and character, has been the direct cause of a series of 

 investigations. On the other hand, modern psychological theory with 

 its increasing emphasis upon behavior, upon the motor aspects of life, 

 could not long ignore the opportunity for study presented by this most 

 complicated and subtle act of individual expression. 



Two lines of investigation have accordingly been inaugurated by the 



