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Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1984, pp.

349-362

Articulated Thoughts, Irrational Beliefs, and Fear of Negative Evaluation'


Gerald C. Davison,' Peter M. Feldman, and Carl E. Osborn
University of Southern California

Contemporary cognitive behavioral theories of psychopathology and therapy assume that people's emotional and behavioral problems are influenced by particular patterns of thought. And yet there is little direct evidence in support of this widespread belief. An experiment is reported that examined the thoughts of people high or low on measures of social-evaluative anxiety and of the tendency to think irrationally. Subjects' cognition was studied under controlled laboratory conditions in the "articulated thoughts during simulated situations" paradigm, in which the subject role-played an audiotaped interpersonal encounter and, at predetermined points, verbalized thoughts elicited by a short segment of the fictitious event. Several findings emerged: Subjects thought less rationally when confronted with stressful situations than with a nonstressful one; subjects high on questionnaire-defined fear of negative evaluation and irrational thinking rated stressful tapes as more anxietyprovoking than did subjects low on these inventories; for highly fearful and irrational subjects, self-reported global anxiety elicited by stressful tapes correlated significantly with irrationality detected in their articulated thoughts. Irrational thinking as measured by articulated thoughts, however, did not correlate with inventories that are expected to predict irrationality in specific situations.

The study reported here utilizes a paradigm that provides virtually "on-line" assessment of cognition during complex experimenter-controlled interpersonal situations. Called articulated thoughts during simulated situations
' This research was supported by NIMH grant MH 24237. Thanks go to Keith Edwards for useful discussions. 'Address all correspondence to Gerald C. Davison, Department of Psychology, Seeley G. Mudd Building, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1061. 349
0147-5916/84/0800-0349803.50/0 1984 Plenum Publishing Corporation

(ATSS), the procedure has a subject pretend that he/she is a participant in a role-played interaction, such as being the object of someone's critical remarks. At predetermined points in the audiotaped scene there is a pause, during which the subject is instructed to verbalize whatever is on his/her mind in reaction to what has occurred just seconds earlier. The subject's tape-recorded verbalizations are later content-analyzed and compared both to his/her articulated thoughts to contrasting stimulus tapes and to thoughts collected from subjects differing on personality dimensions of interest to the experimenter. In our initial paper (Davison, Robins, & Johnson, 1983) we suggested that this paradigm provides more direct and at the same time more openended access to the content of thought than is possible with other methods, such as correlating self-report questionnaires with other descriptive information (e.g., Newmark, Frerking, Cook, & Newmark, 1973), having subjects check off items on an Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (Hollon & Kendall, 1980), or having them write down their thoughts in anticipation of an impending social interaction'(Cacioppo, Glass, & Merluzzi, 1979). These procedures, though useful, impose experimenter-defined constraints on what subjects will report and/or require general, retrospective reports on typical patterns of thinking. Our ATSS procedure is closer to the work of Klinger (1978) and Hurlburt (1979) on in vivo thought sampling but, we believe, has the important advantage of creating specific kinds of situations in which certain thoughts are expected to occur, rather than relying on the vagaries of a subject's actual living conditions to elicit cognitions of particular interest. (For more detailed critique, the reader is referred to Davison et al., 1983.) Recent "think-aloud" research has its historical antecedents (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1981; Genest & Turk, 1981); investigations of perception and problem-solving have for some time had subjects articulate their thoughts while attempting to figure out a problem presented by the experimenter. Duncker (1945), for example, had subjects verbalize their thoughts while solvi ng complex problems, and Davison (1964) had subjects talk aloud about whatever was going through their minds while they tried to perceive correctly an ambiguous picture that was slowly being brought into focus. And perhaps ironically (to anyone but a radical behaviorist), Watson (1920) is believed to have introduced into experimental psychology the notion that verbalized thoughts are useful data. A paradigm for examining thoughts in a variety of situations of relevance to cognitive behavioral workers seems to require a number of features. It should permit open-ended verbal responding that reflects, as much as possible, ongoing thought processes rather than retrospective reporting. Subjects should be constrained as little as possible in what they report, and they should be enabled to make their reports with ease and a minimum of delay. The experimenter should also be able to specify and manipulate the situations to which subjects are reacting, while at the same time being able

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to present events that are sufficiently realistic and complex. Situations unlikely to be bothersome to subjects should be presented along with troubling situations; hitherto, direct comparisons have not often been made. Finally, the procedure should not be prohibitively expensive in time or money. Our earlier report (Davison et al., 1983) demonstrated the credibility of the ATSS procedure to human subjects (at least college undergraduates) and the capacity of the method to pull from them verbalized cognitions that vary meaningfully with the situation to which subjects are exposed. Thus, for example, when subjects role-played overhearing two acquaintances talking disparagingly about them, they articulated greater numbers of thoughts later coded as Critical Evaluation of the Speaker and as Desire to Harm the Speaker than they did when telling us their thoughts in response to a simulated control situation, listening to fellow students criticize a professor unfamiliar to the subject. In turn, this latter, control tape elicited high frequencies of positive as well as negative evaluative statements about the third party, the professor, and other people, rather than about the self or the speaker. Of interest as well was the question of whether subjects scoring high on fear of negative evaluation (Watson & Friend, 1969) would show patterns of articulated thoughts different from those of subjects scoring low. The essence of contemporary cognitive theories (e.g., Beck, 1967; Ellis, 1962) is that certain kinds of people emit certain kinds of thoughts in certain kinds of situations. Thus, for example, an individual described as very sensitive to rejection is assumed to catastrophize more when spoken sharply to than a person who is not especially vulnerable to negative comments from others. Our findings here were inconclusive, for any number of possible reasons: Perhaps more extreme groups are needed to reveal hypothesized differences; the coding scheme used to describe articulated thoughts may somehow not relate to subject differences; we may have committed the Type II error; or, not to be excluded as a possibility, the widely held belief that thoughts in specific situations relate to general personality tendencies may be in serious doubt. Given the newness of our paradigm and the sampling limitations in the initial study, we attributed the absence of correlational findings to methodological limitations. We therefore undertook the following conceptual replication and extension of examining articulated thoughts in socialevaluative simulated situations. METHOD
Materials

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Southern California drama department were hired to play the roles of the speakers in two of the tapes, with different actors being used for each tape. Each was composed of seven spoken segments of 15-25 seconds' duration, with a 30-second blank interval interspersed between segments for subject responses. A high-frequency tone was heard immediately before and after each 30-second response interval to cue subjects to articulate their thoughts. Teaching Assistant (TA) Tape. In this situation, a male speaker' roleplayed a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course. The dialogue consisted of the TA talking to an undergraduate (the subject) who had come to see him in hopes of a grade increase on a paper submitted for regrading. Segments 2, 3, 5, and 7 contained several statements designed to be critical evaluations of the student's work, attitudes, or behavior, such as "Maybe you did not study as hard as you could have, or should have." Segments 1 and 4 contained statements that were positive or complimentary about the student, such as "You're very bright, and I think you can do very well with intellectual problems," while segment 6 was basically neutral, though somewhat in defense of the student. Positive and neutral segments were included to increase the credibility of each simulated situation. Overheard Conversation (OC) Tape. Here, subjects were asked to imagine overhearing two acquaintances (a male and a female) talking about them and the impression they had made at a recent social function. The speakers were not aware of the subject's presence. Six of the seven segments contained statements designed to be critical of the individual subject's appearance, attitudes, and behavior, such as "He (She) just blurts out the first thing that comes to his (her) mind" and ". . . he(she) looked so out of place and "You have to be blind to the facts of the universe to talk like that." Segment 4 was in defense of the student, acknowledging that we all "get pretty argumentative when it comes to certain things." Separate tapes were used for male and female subjects, differing only in gender of the pronouns used. Control Tape. With this tape, the subject was asked to imagine sitting i n the school cafeteria, listening in on two strangers (a male and a female) discussing an unidentified class they are taking and the professor who teaches it. Segments 1, 2, 3, and 5 contained statements that were critical of the class and/or teacher, such as "He doesn't seem to care very much about what he is teaching," whereas segments 6 and 7 were complimentary, containing statements such as "He is well respected in his field." Segment 4 was somewhat in defense of the professor.

Three stimulus tapes, closely similar to those used in our first experiment, were professionally tape-recorded. Students from the University of

' This tape was recorded by the first author, who did not have to act, as such, the role of a critical instructor refusing to raise a student's grade.

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Davison, Feldman, and Osborn Table I. Subject Characteristics Personality measures High FNE/High IBT Males Tape condition Teaching assistant Overheard conversation Mean FNE score Mean IBT score Females Tape condition Teaching assistant Overheard conversation Mean FNE score Mean IBT score Low FNE/Low IBT

Personality Questionnaires. Each subject also completed six questionnaires, three of which had been administered in a preexperimental screening battery used for subject selection, while the remaining three were completed following participation in the experiment. Pretest questionnaires consisted of the Fear of Negative Evaluation scale (Watson & Friend, 1969), the Irrational Beliefs Test (Jones, 1968), and the Assertion Inventory (Gambrill &

Richey, 1975). After having articulated their thoughts to the taped situations, subjects were asked to complete three more questionnaires. The first two concerned the subject's reactions to the stimulus tapes. For each situation, subjects were asked to indicate on a 6-point scale from "very much" to "not at all" how realistic they found the situation, how much they liked the people they had heard on the tapes, how similar these actors were to real people the subject knows, and how anxious each situation made them feel. Finally, subjects were asked to complete the Social Avoidance and Distress scale (Watson & Friend, 1969). Subjects Subjects were selected from the University of Southern California's Human Subjects Pool, composed of undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In all, 330 pretest batteries were returned, consisting of the FNE, IBT, and Al. Extreme groups were then formed in the following way, using scores on the FNE and IBT: Subjects were first rank-ordered by FNE score. Three groups were then formed by dividing the subjects into High, Medium, and Low, with one-third of the males and one-third of the females falling into each grouping. The Medium group was eliminated, leaving 109 High FNE subjects (54 males and 55 females), raw score range of 18-30, and 109 Low FNE subjects (55 males and 54 females), raw score range of 0-10. Within these High and Low FNE groups, subject selection was con-

n = 15 n = 14 23.0 314.0

n = 11 n = 12 5.7 261.3 = 17 7.1 272.9

n=8 n = 15 25.3 322.4

n = 11

Procedure Subjects volunteered to participate in an experiment titled "The things people say to themselves." The soundproofed laboratory contained a com-

fortable armchair with very sensitive stereo microphones on either side to record all of the subject's comments, a pair of high-fidelity stereo speakers for realistically presenting the recorded situations, and a desk for completing postexperimental questionnaires. The experimenter sat in a separate control room containing a reel-to-reel tape recorder for playing the stimulus tapes of simulated situations and a precision cassette deck for recording subject's responses. By a prerecorded cassette tape, subjects were informed that the purpose of the study was to determine the kinds of thoughts people have when they are in certain social situations, and that they were to listen to a tape of a simulated situation in which they were to imagine themselves to be one of the participants. They were told also to tune into their thoughts and feelings, and each time the tape stopped, to say these thoughts aloud, not to

tinued on the basis of their IBT scores. Subjects in the High FNE group scoring below the median IBT score of all 330 subjects were excluded, as were

those in the Low FNE group scoring above the median IBT (for males, IBT = 290.3; for females, IBT = 299.4). Of the 152 potential "extreme" subjects from our original 330, 68% elected to participate in our experiment, yielding a final subject population of 103 persons. Table I displays the number of subjects falling into our High and Low groups, by sex. These subjects represent more extreme FNE groups than those used by Davison et al. (1983) and, furthermore, include subjects who tend to think very irrationally versus those who do not. The High FNE/ High IBT subjects are our analogue to neurotically social-anxious people.

respond overtly to the stimulus situation. Subjects were encouraged to be as frank and complete in their comments as possible and to imagine themselves in the situation as vividly as possible. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured to encourage uncensored and full articulation of thoughts. All subjects were presented first with a description of the situational context of the control tape and then with the control tape itself. This was followed by the appropriate situational context for one of the experimental

tapes, OC or TA, and then the experimental tape itself. Subjects had been preassigned to condition by rank-ordering all potential male and female subjects by their FNE scores and alternating OC and TA conditions to assure

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Davison, Feldman, and Osborn Table 11. Mean Sum Irrational Beliefs (SIB) Scores of Articulated Thoughts TA experimental condition Control tape Rater 1 Rater.2 Average Experimental tape Rater 1 Rater 2 Average 3.61 6.76 5.19 19.04 22.22 20.63 OC experimental condition 3.90 5.85 4.88 20.04 22.67 21.36

an equal and unbiased number of High and Low subjects in each of the two experimental conditions. Finally, all subjects completed the three postexperimental questionnaires. In summary, then, the study involved a mixed design with one withinsubject manipulated factor of Control versus Experimental tape, one between-subjects manipulated factor of Teaching Assistant versus Overheard Conversation experimental condition, and one between-subjects factor of High versus Low FNE/IBT score. RESULTS The content analysis employed in the present experiment was less atomistic than that used in Davison et al. (1983). Raters listened to a given 30-second segment while reading its transcription and then made a global judgment as to the degree of presence of each of Ellis's irrational beliefs. In this fashion we hoped to capture the essence of a subject's irrationality as defined by Ellis; this seemed appropriate given that subjects had in part been preselected as falling at the extremes of the IBT. Scoring System. Each subject provided 14 response segments, 7 to an experimental tape and 7 to the control. All segments were independently scored by two raters (the junior authors) for the presence of each of Ellis's (1962) 11 Irrational Beliefs on a scale from 0 (not present) to 6 (extremely irrational). Raters looked both for implied endorsement of Ellis's irrational beliefs and for evidence of absolutistic, demanding thinking, marked by the use of words like have to, should, and must. A Sum Irrational Beliefs (SIB) score was then computed for each subject on each stimulus tape by adding together the 11 Irrational Beliefs scores for all 7 tape segments. Therefore, every subject received from each rater an SIB score for the control tape and another one for the experimental tape. Reliability. Both raters had served as experimenters, but when running subjects and scoring their articulated thoughts, each was blind to subjects' FNE/IBT scores. After the raters had practiced together on several test segments to assure common definitions of irrationality, 17 subjects were randomly selected from the OC group, and their responses to the experimental tape were coded independently by each rater. Two statistical tests were used to determine interrater reliability. First, the raw SIB scores from both raters were correlated, yielding a Pearson rxr _ + .81. In addition, the 17 scores were then rank-ordered and compared using Spearman's Coefficient of Rank Correlation, p. Here we obtained a value of p = +.67, which is significant at the p < .01 level. The remaining OC responses were independently scored by both raters, followed by the TA

responses and finally the control tape responses. This order was chosen to help keep the raters blind to their respective content analysis of one tape when determining the amount of irrational thinking on a given subject's other tape. Reliability was assessed three more times as content analysis proceeded. The overall Pearson correlation between the raters' SIB scores for all 53 OC tapes was rx,, = +.73; for the 51 TA tapes, rx,, _ +.68; and for all 103 responses to the control tape, rx,, = + .53. The lower correlation for the control tape was expected due to the restricted range of scores for this low stress condition. Articulated Thoughts Table II shows the mean SIB scores for all subjects' articulated thoughts separately for each rater as well as the average score. No sex differences were found, so the following results are reported across sex. Whether one uses the scoring of Rater 1, Rater 2, or their average, the results are the same: Subjects' articulated thoughts were more irrational when they listened to either experimental tape than when they listened to the control tape (p < .001). Subjects' thoughts were scored as equally irrational whether they listened to the Teaching Assistant tape or the Overheard Conversation tape. However, subjects did not think differently if they had scored high on the FNE and the IBT than if they had scored low. As was the case in the Davison et al. study, then, there was no interaction between articulated thoughts and personality measures.
Global Self-Report of Anxiety

It will be recalled that subjects rated how anxiety-provoking each tape was, after they had articulated their thoughts to them. Scores ranged from 0 = very anxious to 6 = not at all anxious. Both experimental tapes (the

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Davison, Feldman, and Osborn Table III. Pearson Correlation Coefficients among Several Personality Measures FNE SAD AID AIP AIDIF IBT "p < .001. b y < .01. . 56" . 65 . 60" -.25 b . 79 IBT . 45" . 56" . 50" -.22 b

TA and the OC) were rated as significantly more stressful than the control tape. This holds when all subjects are considered together (3.19 vs. 4.46, t = 8.18, p < .001) as well as when subjects' self-reports are examined as a function of FNE/IBT score and tape condition (all p values < .001 except for one at < .01). In addition, High FNE/High IBT subjects reported themselves more anxious following either experimental tape than did Low FNE/Low IBT subjects (2.85 versus 3.54, t = 2.33, p < .02). This difference turns out to be due to the TA condition; that is, statistical significance is reached when Highs are compared to Lows who listened to the TA tape (2.65 versus 3.68, t = 2.38, p < .02) but not when ratings of the OC tape were compared. In all, these self-report findings confirm the greater stressfulness of our experimental tapes-which can be considered a check on our manipulation-and, in addition, reveal a meaningful difference in people scoring high on FNE/IBT versus those scoring low. Of particular interest is the relationship between subjects' self-reported anxiety arising from each stimulus tape and their SIB scores. Since the control tape was nonstressful, we did not expect to find any correlations here; indeed, all were nonsignificant. In the experimental condition, in contrast, a few significant relationships were found, and it mattered not whether we used the content analyses of Rater 1 or 2 or their average. For all subjects (N = 103), the correlations hovered around significance, but when subjects were separated by FNE/IBT scores, several statistically significant findings emerged. For High FNE/High IBT subjects, self-reported anxiety on the combined experimental tapes correlated r = +. 26 (p < .03) with the SIB score. And this significant correlation is due to subjects' reactions to the OC tape, where we found a correlation of r = +.49 (p < .01); nothing of significance was found for the TA tape. Furthermore, the correlation for the OC tape reached significance also when subjects were not separated on the personality variables (r = +.25, p < .04), indicating something special about this stimulus tape. But clearly the addition of the FNE and IBT personality variables markedly enhances the significant relationship between subjects' SIB scores on their articulated thoughts and their global ratings of anxiety to the OC experimental tape.
Correlations among the Several Personality Measures

cients between subjects' FNE and IBT scores and their scores on the SAD and Assertion Inventory (AID, AIP, AIDIF). All of these correlations are positive and highly significant, as are the interactions between High and Low FNE/IBT groups and SAD (F(1, 101) = 11.72, p < .001), AID (F(1, 101) = 16.95, p < .001), AIP (F(1, 101) = 10.61, p < .001), and AIDIF (F(1, 101) = 3.88, p < .01). One can conclude from these paper-and-pencil selfreport measures that people who are highly fearful of negative evaluation and/or tend to subscribe to irrational beliefs are also avoidant of social encounters, are distressed when they do not excape/avoid them, are anxious when an assertive response is called for, and regard themselves as unlikely to engage in assertive behavior when such behavior is called for. Furthermore, the FNE and IBT themselves are very strongly correlated (r = + .79), indicating that people fearful of negative evaluation tend also to think in unrealistic ways.
Correlations between Sum Irrational Beliefs Scores and Other Personality Measures

We used FNE and IBT scores to form extreme groups of subjects. Several other personality measures were taken, however, in a purely heuristic vein, and since they are widely used in cognitive behavioral research, we report here several intercorrelations. Table III lists the Pearson correlation coeffi-

We examined also the correlations between SIB scores and subjects' scores on the other personality tests. What we discovered here were correlations that went counter to expectation. Scores on the SAD correlated -.18 (p < .03) with irrationality found in the articulated thoughts, and when subjects were divided into High FNE/High IBT versus Low, the correlation disappeared for the Low and became stronger for the High, r = - .35 (p < .005). Using the IBT, correlations fail to achieve statistical significance (-.11, p . 13 for all subjects; -.21, p = .06 for High FNE/High IBT; -.17, p = . 12 for Lows) but are all in the negative direction. Correlations for the Assertion Inventory Scale were inconsistent.

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DISCUSSION The results of the present experiment confirm those of our initial study, namely, that people articulate less rational thoughts when confronted with stressful social-evaluative situations than with those not involving criticism of themselves. High FNE/High IBT subjects' self-rated anxiety to the experimental tapes also correlated significantly with their SIB scores on those tapes, in contrast to the absence of any such correlation on the control tapes. Furthermore, this correlation was stronger (r = .49) with the OC experimental tape, in which subjects hear themselves being criticized behind their back by two acquaintances. Perhaps the FNE and the IBT tap into social evaluation more than they do evaluation of academic competencies, the subject matter of the TA experimental tape. Given how different the measures themselves are, these significant relationships provide additional support for the utility of the ATSS paradigm. One further relevant datum is that High FNE/High IBT subjects reported more anxiety from the experimental tapes than did Low FNE/Low IBT subjects, expecially in the TA condition. However, we did not find an interaction between FNE/IBT scores and the SIB scores of the articulated thoughts. Thus, as in the Davison et al. study, we failed to find an interaction between subjects' articulated thoughts and their scores on personality inventories measuring (a) the tendency to be fearful of negative evaluation, and (2) the tendency to think irrationally. Furthermore, several additional correlational findings go in a direction opposite to what one would expect if one were assuming a close relationship between general personality (trait) measures and articulated thoughts in specific situations. An explanation for these anomalous findings may be found in the different domains sampled by the SIB scores and the questionnaires. That is, our SIB scores are derived from a content analysis of a highly specific sampling of subjects' thoughts, whereas the self-report data from the SAD, the IBT, and the Assertion Inventory represent subjects' general observations of themselves in a wider variety of less focused situations. In order to respond to questionnaire items, subjects have to reflect over a host of situations and then draw a general conclusion about their characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. As pointed out in Davison et al. (1983), the experimenter thereby obtains from subjects their abstracted or generalized views, and not necessarily what they actually think in any particular situation. These correlations, not all of them significant by conventional standards, nonetheless contribute to the general picture of a lack of a positive relationship between articulated thoughts in specific simulated situations and

personality trait measures that current cognitive theory would expect to correlate with articulated thoughts." The findings reported here for the ATSS paradigm should in future research be related to other methods of cognitive assessment, such as the Dysfunctional Thoughts Record employed by Beck and his associates (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979), the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire of Hollon and Kendall (1980), the thought-listing technique of Cacioppo et al. (1979), and other procedures for discovering what is on people's minds as they negotiate their way in life. And yet perhaps not too much should be expected from such comparisons. Each method makes different demands on the subject. Certainly in vivo self-monitoring of cognitions requires more self-discipline than our ATSS procedure, for the subject employing any in vivo method has to make relatively long-term and complex changes in daily living -carrying records with him; keeping track of certain categories of cognition, behavior, and affect; and noting these as soon as possible after their occurrence (Hollon & Kendall, 1981). In addition, the range of situations in which thought is sampled is surely much broader with any in vivo technique than with the more focused, experimenter-controlled exposures that characterize the ATSS paradigm. Comparisons among different cognitive assessment procedures, therefore, will pose both conceptual and practical problems -but will be instructive to pursue. An additional consideration in the ATSS procedure is the coding scheme and categories employed to describe the raw data. The scheme reported in this paper is molar as compared to the content analysis in our initial paper (Davison et al., 1983). Clearly there are many levels of analysis between these extremes, and it remains to be seen how different categorization methods relate to each other. Furthermore, our point of departure thus far has been clinical theory and research, in particular Ellis's views on abnormality. It is for this reason that our content analyses are designed to tap into "irrational" thinking. Theory and research in cognitive psychology (e.g., Neisser, 1976) and social cognition (e.g., Higgins, Herman, & Zanna, 1981) would lead one to construct different categorization schemes. Finally, cognitive behavioral researchers should not forget their behavioral roots. In addition to examining relationships among types of thought categories, cognitions, and subjects, it is important to study how think-aloud
'Recent data in our lab do, however, show a significant main effect when a clinical population is compared to an unselected control group on the ATSS. We found that socially anxious students referred from the university counseling center articulated more irrational thoughts overall than control subjects. These results, then, confirm the oft-made caution that statements bearing on clinical issues are best derived from studies of identified clinical populations; one can go just so far with subject analogues.

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data relate to actual behavior (Kendall & Korgeski, 1979). A study under way in our lab collects ATSS information on both speech-anxious and less troubled subjects and, in a separate setting, rates subjects' public speaking performance in the manner pioneered by Paul (1966). The most straightforward prediction is that subjects self-identified as speech-anxious will (a) show up that way on a behavioral sample of such behavior, and likewise (b) articulate thoughts discriminably different from those of controls when confronted with appropriate simulated situations. One might predict also that (c) degree of anxiety or irrationality as coded on ATSS will correlate with degree of apprehension as observed/inferred on the behavioral sample. And yet, in line with the cautions of Lazarus (1966) and Lang (1968), discrepancies among topographically different measures of what is presumably the same construct can be as interesting as significant correlations among them. The relationships overall between cognition and observable behavior promise to be as complex and "imperfect" as those that investigators have been finding for many years among measures in the same modality.

Hurlburt, R. T. (1979). Random sampling of cognitions and behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 13, 103-111. Jones, R. G. (1968). A factored measure of Ellis's irrational belief system with personality and maladjustment correlates. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Texas Technological College. Kendall, P. C., & Korgeski, G. P. (1979). Assessment and cognitive-behavioral interventions. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 3, 1-21. Klinger, E. (1978). Modes of normal conscious flow. In K. S. Pope & J. L. Singer (Eds.), The stream of consciousness: Scientific investigations into the flow of human experience. New York: Plenum. Lang, P. J. (1968). Fear reduction and fear behavior: Problems in treating a construct. In J. M. Schlien (Ed.), Research in psychotherapy (Vol. 3). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Lazarus, R. S. (1966). Psychological stress and the coping process. New York: McGraw-Hill. Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and reality. San Francisco: Freeman. Newmark, C. S., Frerking, R. A., Cook, L., & Newmark, L. (1973). Endorsement of Ellis' irrational beliefs as a function of psychopathology. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 29, 300-302. Paul, G. L. (1966). Insight versus desensitization in psychotherapy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Watson, D., & Friend, R. (1969). Measurement of social-evaluative anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33, 448-457. Watson, J. B. (1920). Is thinking merely the action of language mechanisms? British Journal of Psychology, 11, 87-104.

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