Emotional Rats

"If we are to control and modify abnormal behavior, extensive knowledge concerning the bases for temperamental differences is required. Why does one child have a temper tantrum when in the same situation another child remains composed? . . . Why does Miss Jones embarrass her instructor with an hysterical outbreak [on] receiving a poor grade, whereas Miss Smith accepts failure all too philosophically?"

So wrote Professor Calvin Springer Hall Jr. recently in an article entitled "The Inheritance of Emotionality," published in the Sigma Xi Quarterly. Dr. Hall, who though only 30 is chairman of the psychology division at Cleveland's Western Reserve University and who is also getting bald, has spent many of his adult years studying "emotionality" (inherent susceptibility to emotional stimuli). Some researchers, such as Behaviorist John Broadus Watson, have tried to show that emotional endowments are all the same at birth, that differences appearing later are due to environment.

Dr. Hall admits that the reasons for one person's specific fear of snakes, another's of high places, another's of germs may well be due to environmental conditioning. But he believes that such conditioning simply controls the direction of emotional response, that the basic amount of emotionality is inherited. The researches which have led him to this opinion have been conducted by him and his co-workers on rats.

He decided to prove his point by breeding a strain of highly emotional rats, another strain of unemotional rats. His arena for testing rat emotion was a well-lighted circular enclosure about seven feet across, with a smooth linoleum floor. Since rats like nooks, crannies and darkness they found this "open field" mildly terrifying. They showed emotion by excreting. That excretion is a valid evidence of emotion is affirmed by the experiences of countless soldiers suffering extreme fear in battle, of some aviators just about to crash, by the observation of dog-owners who see their pets stop more frequently at lampposts when excited, even by the testimony of psychiatrists that in a few unfortunate people the rousing of amorous passion is accompanied by overpowering excretory stimuli.

Other criteria of emotion in Dr. Hall's rats were refusal to eat, refusal to move about. They were placed in the enclosure for two minutes a day, day after day. In general the emotional rats manifested uneasiness longest, started eating latest. The psychologist bred emotional males to emotional females, unemotional males to unemotional females. He thus obtained two second generations, one of which was seven times more emotional than the other. Conclusion: "Differences in emotionality appear to be genetically determined."

To those who protest that rat emotions are not to be compared with human emotions, Dr. Hall replies that human psychology has evolved directly from animal psychology--and that if you do make such a protest "you are not really an evolutionist, and therefore your views deserve little serious consideration."

Last week Psychologist Hall disclosed that he has carried his selective breeding to the fifth generation, obtaining even more pronounced emotional differences between the two strains. Moreover, autopsies performed on some of the emotional rats showed that they had definitely larger adrenal, thyroid and pituitary glands than the others. This brings variations in emotional constitution down with a thump to the solid earth of organic difference.

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