Psychomotor Aspects of Mental Disease. An Experimental Study

in two papers, one by R. Luft and the other by J. W. Conn and their respective colleagues. It is impossible in a short review to do justice to all these excellent papers. Suffice it to say that those who wish to learn of the most recent aspects of research in these fields of endocrinology cannot afford to ignore this volume. Since this is a yearly publication, many of the statements cannot reflect more than the opinions of the participants at the time they were given, and indeed many may well be altered by now. Nevertheless, in this day and age, with the present volume of papers rising to increasing levels, it is pleasant to know that by the use of this and similar volumes an investigator need not be more than a year behind the current thought in his field. This is a clear presentation by the author of a series of well-planned studies of psychomotor performance. The experiments were suggested by the hope that tests of psychomotor function might distinguish between the different categories of psychiatric patients and even be a sensitive guide to the degree of psychological disability. Tests were limited to those which measured fine movements. These included speed of initiating movement, tapping rapidity, manual and finger dexterity, and a more complex motor response termed the "disjunctive lift reaction." All were measured mechanically with considerable precision. These tasks were selected from a much larger group of procedures after it had been established by factor analysis that each of the four tests assessed relatively independent and unrelated skills in the motor area. Subjects who were studied included groups of normal, neurotic, pseudoneurotic, and chronic schizophrenic individuals. The numbers were large and the groups well matched. The major finding was a very significant difference between the normal and schizophrenic subjects with a gradient between these extremes-the more disturbed the patients, the poorer in general were their performances. Chronic schizophrenics as a group reacted much more slowly and were less adept than all other subjects. The differences were unequivocal, but the meaning of these discrepancies was not quite so clear. After discussing the possibility that chronic schizo-phrenics might have done poorly on these tests because of their emotional isolation, lack of motivation, inability to concentrate etc., the author discarded these explanations for reasons which were well argued but inconclusive. Instead he favored the view that the psychomotor impairment of …