ABSTRACT
The galvanic reaction depends on attention to the stimulus. The first person to do real psychological research using the galvanometer was Veraguth, who in 1906 worked with this instrument and with Jung's association experiments. In the experiments greater galvanic fluctuations are caused, as a rule, by physical than by psychological stimuli. This may be due to the fact that they occurred before the psychological stimuli, early stimuli nearly always causing greater reactions than later ones. While normal reactions vary greatly in different individuals, they are nearly always greater than pathological reactions. In depression and stupor, galvanic reactions are low because attention is poor and associations are inhibited. In alcoholism and in the euphoric stage of general paralysis, reactions are high because of greater excitability. In dementia, reactions are practically nil because of the lack of associations. Reactions show great individual variation and within certain rather wide limits are entirely independent of the original bodily resistance.
