"Suppurating Serials"

The Buffalo Advertising Club last week heard a Manhattan psychiatrist on the subject of a couple of soap operas, and was he burned up! Clinical studies of such programs are rare, though clinical studies of their listeners abound. Dr. Louis Berg took only a casual interest in soap operas until some of his women patients suffered relapses after listening to them.

A stouthearted scientist, Dr. Berg took samplings, narrowed down the field to ten, concentrated on two. To each of these, The Right to Happiness (NBC) and Woman in White (CBS), he listened for three weeks. His findings, as presented last week, were so unequivocal that he was constrained to point out that they did not apply to all daytime radio serials.*

The emotional content of his two prizes consisted, according to Dr. Berg, of sexual jealousy, fear, rage, revulsion, frustration, insecurity. The situations included domestic discord, separation, divorce, sickroom scenes, courtroom scenes. The characters--"There appear to be no 'happy' characters. . . . All present single psychological profiles. They are unrelievedly bad or good. . . ."

Dr. Berg wound up his study satisfied that he knew what had caused relapses in his patients. Said he: "The cumulative effect of a diet of corrupting melodrama could not fail to product an 'anxiety state.' Even those patients who were cautioned of the baleful effects of listening to these serials found it harder to resist. . . . The hairline that divides the normal from the neurotic . . . can disappear from such influence as the unwitting sadism of suppurating serials. . . ."

*They do not apply, for example, to Against the Storm (TIME, Nov. 10).

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