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Investigates whether the relative amount of bad, neutral, and good news on television has corresponding effects on viewers' image of the community depicted and of the carrying newscast. Concludes that bad news creates a bad image for the community but that good news does not produce a more favorable image than neutral news. (MM)

This article provides data on the validity of the scales from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to identify alcoholics, in differentiating psychiatric hospital admissions with alcoholic problems from those admissions without alcoholic problems. The sample included all testable patients admitted to a Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital during a six month period. The criteria of problem drinking, against which the psychometric classification was compared. The mean of the alcoholic group was not significantly different from that of the nonalcoholic group on any of the three alcoholism scales. A second comparison between alcoholics and nonalcoholics using more stringent criteria of alcoholism, that is requiring all three indicators to be present, resulted in significant mean differences on two of the three scales.

The article cites a study that aims to analyze the effects of the tranquilizing drug "thorazine" on attempts to change, through selective reinforcement, the preferred responses to stimulus words in patients with schizophrenia. The results showed no evidence that thorazine has any significant effect on attempts to alter the preferred responses to stimulus words of these patients. The drug did not interfere with performance on retention after it was administered during the period from the learning trials to the test for retention. It was stressed that learning accomplished under drug conditions was not held, the same with learning accomplished under placebo conditions.

The article presents a study, which aims to apply the Gilberstadt-Duker rules to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profiles of admissions to a Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in order to obtain data on the proportion of profiles classified. It might be noted that the Gilberstadt-Duker rules were originally derived on admissions to a Veterans Administration inpatient setting. The Gilberstadt-Duker MMPI rules were applied to the MMPI profiles of consecutive admissions to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Of the 589 profiles, 33.45% could be classified into one of the 19 Gilberstadt-Duker types. Nine of the types had a frequency of occurrence of less than 1%.

The article discusses the relationship of subjects whose verbal behavior did not change during a verbal conditioning experiment with those subjects whose verbal behavior did change. Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) was chosen because a number of hypotheses could be generated relative to the performance of "conditionable" and "nonconditionable" subjects on these scales. Sixty schizophrenics were given the EPPS and verbal conditioning trials. These subjects were divided into a "conditionable" group and a "nonconditionable" group on the basis of their performance on the conditioning trials. The EPPS scores of these two groups were then compared. As compared to "nonconditionable" subjects, "conditionable" subjects had lower scores.