ABSTRACT
The set of studies completes psychologist's chain of deductions leading from the physiological notions of an inhibition-excitation balance, through conditioning, individual differences, personality types, and through socialization to the structure of social attitudes and the formation of political parties. Quite generally, the theory accounts also for the main feature of dysthymic personalities, namely their excessive anxiety reactions. There are a large number of delinquents who may be described as having psychopathic personalities, but many people who are psychopathic may never become delinquent.' Strong autonomic-emotional lability and reactivity produce excessive fear reactions to painful and harmful stimuli; through unusually strong and responsive conditioning mechanisms these fear reactions become attached to accidental, irrelevant, neutral stimuli which happen to precede or accompany the fear-producing occasion. Through their connection with these conditioned fears or anxieties, the neutral stimuli acquire drive properties, such that avoidance of these stimuli becomes rewarding through reduction of the conditioned fear or anxiety attaching to them.
