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This study was designed to determine if visualization of anger- and fear-provoking scenes produced differential physiological patterns similar to those produced by in vivo manipulations. Normotensive college students were selected on the basis of their responses to newly developed Anger and Fear/Anxiety questionnaires and for their ability to construct arousing scenes during a screening interview. In a 2 × 2 design (intensity × emotion), four scenes (high and low anger, high and low fear) were constructed individually for each of 16 subjects to imagine. Diastolic blood pressure, systolic blood pressure, and heart rate were monitored during visualization of each scene. Change in diastolic blood pressure was significantly greater for high anger than for high fear as predicted. Analysis of change in heart rate and systolic blood pressure showed significant effects for intensity only. These results provide further support for the concept of physiological differentiation in human emotion and suggest the utility of imagery for systematic study of human emotional responding.

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Twenty-nine insomniacs underwent four consecutive sleep laboratory evaluations before and after receiving tension-release relaxation training, no-tension-release relaxation training, or no-treatment. On the basis of the discrepancy between subjective and EEGdefined measures of latency to sleep onset, subjects were classified as pseudoinsomniacs or idiopathic insomniacs. As predicted, tension-release relaxation was significantly more effective than the other two conditions on subjective sleep measures, regardless of insomnia subtype and on objective sleep measures only for idiopathic insomniacs. Subjective improvement was maintained at 12-month followup. Numerous differences between the two subtypes emerged on pretherapy and during-therapy measures distinct from the latency measures, but changes on those variables were unrelated to outcome improvement.

Subjects with reported sleep-onset disturbance were given progressive relaxation training, placebo, or no-treatment. All three conditions showed significant improvement in daily reported sleep onset over the duration of the study. Between-condition effects were limited to relaxation superiority over no-treatment on Stage 1 sleep, and over placebo on postquestionnaire items and sleep-latency reports at 1-year follow-up.

Spider phobics and speech anxious subjects imaged fear scenes with spider and publicspeaking content and a series of standard scenes that were constructed to vary in degree of emotional arousal and movement. Heart rate, skin conductance, and ocular activity were recorded. Spider phobics rated all imagery contents as more vivid and reported more scene movement than speech anxious subjects. Both groups responded to their own fear scenes with higher ratings of emotion and a greater physiological response than to the other group's fear scenes. The arousal response of spider phobics to relevant fear scenes was greater than that of speech anxious subjects. The data suggest that the outcome of imagery-based therapies may be partly determined by type of fear.

A problem frequently encountered by investigators measuring scalp‐recorded DC potentials is baseline drift artifact. The sources of baseline drift are many and it is often very difficult to remove drift from the primary data. The problem is particularly acute when long recording epochs are under investigation. The present paper proposes a software solution. A FORTRAN IV computer program defines drift as a significant linear trend in prestimulus voltage on successive experimental trials. When drift is determined to be present, its slope is computed and statistically removed from the data in the poststimulus (response) period. A sample data set is included which demonstrates the method's marked improvement of signal‐to‐noise ratios, as represented by reduced error variance and improved statistical discrimination between the independent variables of an experiment.