The total number of different words elicited in response to any stimulus word is limited, varying from two hundred and eighty words in response to _anger_ to seventy-two words in response to _needle_. Furthermore, for the great majority of subjects the limits are still narrower; to take a striking instance, in response to _dark_ eight hundred subjects gave one or another of the following seven words: _light, night, black, color, room, bright, gloomy;_ while only two hundred gave reactions other than these words; and only seventy subjects, out of the total number of one thousand, gave reactions which were not given by any other subject.

If any record obtained by this method be examined by referring to the frequency tables, the reactions contained in it will fall into two classes: the _common_ reactions, those which are to be found in the tables, and the _individual_ reactions, those which are not to be found in the tables. For the sake of accuracy, any reaction word which is not found in the table in its identical form, but which is a grammatical variant of a word found there, may be classed as

_doubtful_.

The value of any reaction may be expressed by the figure representing the percentage of subjects who gave it. Thus the reaction, _table--chair_, which was given by two hundred and sixty-seven out of the total of our one thousand subjects, possesses a value of 26.7 per cent. The significance of this value from the clinical standpoint will be discussed later.

Sec. 4. NORMAL ASSOCIATIONAL TENDENCIES

The normal subjects gave, on the average. 6.8 per cent of individual reactions, 1.5 per cent of doubtful ones, and 91.7 cent of common ones. The range of variation was rather wide, a considerable number of subjects giving no individual reactions at all, while a few gave over 30 per cent.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the study of the reactions furnished by our normal subjects it was possible to analyze the record of any subject only by removing it from the mass of material which forms our tables, and using as the standard of comparison the reactions of the remaining 999 subjects.]

In order to determine the influence of age, sex, and education upon the tendency to give reactions of various values, we have selected three groups of subjects for special study: (1) one hundred persons of collegiate or professional education; (2) one hundred persons of common school education, employed in one of the State hospitals as attendants, but not as trained nurses; and (3) seventy-eight children under sixteen years of age. The reactions given by these subjects have been classified according to frequency of occurrence into seven groups: (a) individual reactions (value 0); (b) doubtful reactions (value +-); (c) reactions given by one other person (value 0.1 per cent); (d) those given by from two to five others (value 0.2--0.5 per cent); (e) those given by from six to fifteen others (value 0.6-1.5 per cent); (f) those given by from sixteen to one hundred others (value 1.6--10.0 per cent); and (g) those given by more than one hundred others (value over 10.0 per cent). The averages obtained from these groups of subjects are shown in Table 1, and the figures for men and women are given separately.

A Study of Association in Insanity by Kent, Grace Helen

TABLE I