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Excitable psychopathic personalities manifest qualitative and quantitative disorders of cognitive activity directly unrelated to emotional reactions. If the result of the activity is estimated by some other person with the aid of positive and negative reinforcement stimuli, deficit of the training is marked to a much greater degree than in cases where the excitable personality itself draws, on the basis of information available in the feedback stimulus, the conclusion whether its decision was right or erroneous.

Evoked cortical potentials in response to conditioned visual stimuli were recorded in excitable psychopathic personalities in the course of formation and reproduction of temporary relations with a realized or non-realized emotional word. Diazepam (10 mg intramuscularly) suppresses cortical reaction worked out previously with the aid of a realized emotional word and fails to produce and action if that word was non-realized. The fact of the lack of the diazepam effect on conditioned emotional reactions formed at the non-realized level should be taken into consideration in the treatment of patients with disturbances in the emotional sphere.

Selective attention was studied by registering cortical evoked potentials to acoustic stimuli in mental patients and mentally healthy subjects of old age. Disorder of selective attention in the patients was manifested in an impaired ability of the higher portions of the central nervous system to differentiate between essential and non-essential external stimuli as well as in a weakened inhibition of irrelevant information.

The author discusses the three principles of higher nervous activity (determinism, analysis and synthesis, attachment of dynamics to the structure) formulated by I. P. Pavlov and their theoretical significance in the studies of physiological bases of mental disorders. The modern conditioned reflexectory and electrophysiological methods for studying higher nervous activity of normals and mentally ill patients are analyzed. The significance of studies in the field of physiological bases of mental disorders for the application of pathogenetically founded therapy is discussed as well as for the natural scientific understanding of mental phenomena in health and disease from the aspect of determinism.