The Effect of Verbal Suggestion on Output and Variability of Muscular Work

Statement of the Problem This study investigates the effect on the output and variability of muscular work of telling the subject that his task is "easy," "medium" or "hard," when actually the task is of uniform objective difficulty. Subjects and Apparatus The subjects were fifty men and fifty women students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years. The subjects of each sex were divided at random into a control and an experimental group with twenty-five subjects in each of these groups. The muscular work studied consisted of maximal contractions on the Smedley hand dynamometer. Among the subjects of each sex both groups, control and experimental, had practically the same mean initial strength of grip. Table 1 contains the means and the prob-