Science: Mind Study

The late Ringgold Wilmer (“Ring”) Lardner once listed what he considered the ten most beautiful words in English. They were: gangrene, flit, scram, mange, wretch, smoot, guzzle, McNaboe, blute, crene.*

If Satirist Lardner had his tongue in his cheek, he may also have been aware of the finding of psychologists that the words commonly thought to be ugly-sounding are so considered, consciously or unconsciously, because of unpleasant associations and not because of phonetical harshness. Scholars recognize a few words as truly onomatopoeic; e.g., tinkle, plash, squawk. But in the vast majority of cases the reaction of a hearer is determined by meaning, not by combinations of vowels and consonants.

In confirmation of this dictum, Professor Edward Lee Thorndike of Columbia University last week presented his study of word euphony to the American Psychological Association in Manhattan. This year’s president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Thorndike is famed for researches in industrial, educational and animal psychology, is reputed to make use of everyone he encounters as research material. Dr. Thorndike found that his numerous subjects, asked to judge by sound alone, preferred such words as harmony, ma donna, resolute, serene, swan to such others as belch, waddle, stink and wart. But when the human sounding-boards were confronted with nonsense words there was no marked preference.

Other problems and preoccupations discussed by the psychologists:

Ape v. Child. In 1925 Yale University got four chimpanzees for animal psychology research, encouraged them to breed. Now Yale has 40 apes. Last week Professor Milton C. Forster described a competition between young chimpanzees and two children lent by faculty members. Both apes and moppets were silently trained to release a telegraph key when stimulated in turn by a sight, a sound, a touch. The apes’ reaction times were as fast as the children’s. Even when the subjects were trained to a “choice response” (two keys, two stimuli) the animals held their own with the humans.

“Personality” Dr. Edwin G. Flemming of Manhattan wondered what traits in a young girl moved others to say: “She has personality.” He had some high-school teachers grade 84 girls on personality and on a long list of character factors. He discovered that to be ranked high in personality a girl should be: interesting in conversation, competent, a person of wide interests, intelligent, athletic, a good sport, sincere, adaptable. He also found eight personality types: the entertaining, the brilliant, the culture-talented, the just, the pretty, the good fellow, the good neighbor, the diplomat.

Monkey Dominance. Because the University of Wisconsin’s A. H. Maslow was curious about dominance in primates, 15 pairs of monkeys, each pair of the same sex, were introduced to each other for the first time. In every case one of the two took instant command of the situation, reduced the other to submission. The bully got 97% of the food, started all but a negligible percentage of the fights, never cowered, seldom retreated. To this treatment the browbeaten monkey responded by passivity, cringing, flight, or female sex behavior, regardless of the sex of the pair.

Sissies & He-Men. Manhattan copyreaders gleefully headlined a squib from the meeting: CITY EDITORS JUST SISSIES. Their pretext was a report by Stanford University’s Edward Kellogg Strong Jr., who studied the preoccupations of 800 men and women. Findings: “Farmers and engineers have the most masculine and youthful interests; journalists, advertising men, ministers and lawyers have the most feminine interests, while ministers, teachers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries and school superintendents have the most mature interests. With increasing age both sexes become more feminine in interest.”

Cribbers. Ninety-three college students were given a classroom test, requested not to consult answers in the back of the book. When Professor Donald W. MacKinnon of Bryn Mawr had left the room, 43 students turned to the answers, were singled out by Dr. MacKinnon who was spying on the group through a hidden screen. Subsequent examination revealed that the “cribbers,” in general, were aggressive in speech and manner, had cribbed with a clear conscience, had been corporally punished by their fathers in childhood, had fiercely resented it.

Common Sense. No science is more torn by internal dissension than psychology. Last week Dr. David Wechsler of Manhattan’s Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital stood up to assail those of his colleagues who repose blind confidence in the IQ (mental age times one hundred divided by chronological age), and who insist on identifying mental deficiency with intellectual deficiency. Mental deficiency, he said, is not a specific disease or a clinical entity, but inability to cope with environment. It may take the form of social or moral rather than intellectual deficiency. As judged by psychometric tests, almost every other Negro is a mental defective, but the blacks adapt themselves well to their own world. Contrariwise, many a high IQ scorer is crippled by social, moral or emotional shortcomings. “What psychologists need,” said Psychiatrist Wechsler, “is a little more common sense and exercise of personal judgment.”

*To many a Frenchman, ignorant of the language, the most beautiful English word combination is cellar door.