The Effects of Personality Variables on Verbal Conditioning

This study was designed to determine those personality variables which distinguish a good verbal conditioning subjects form a poor one. Subjects were twenty-six undergraduate students divided into two groups of ten subjects each and one group of six subjects selected on the basis of a close correspondence between their level I-M and II-S octant summaries on the interpersonal Diagnostic Grid of the Leary System of Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. All subjects were requested to tell two stories including themselves, the experimenter and two other people. During the second story the subjects were reinforced by the experimenter with reinforcement consisting of standard verbal reinforces. The data were analyzed on terms of the frequency of the occurrence of the criterion response in each story which in this case represented references to the experimenter. The statistic employed was a Lindquist Type I Analysis of Variance. The obtained value for the F ratio for interaction effects was not significant indicating overall conditioning did not take place and the null hypothesis of no difference between or within groups should be accepted. Although the F ratios for within and between subjects comparisons were not significant, the obtained values of F for these comparison approached the values required for significance indicating trends in the data which may be of importance for further research