Citation

Mohr GJ, Gundlach RH. J. Exp. Psychol. 1927; 10(2): 117-157.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1927, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/h0074522

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Experiments to discover whether Kretschmer's physical types could be determined among a convict population and whether, with a selected number of typical men, differences in performance on a large battery of tests could be determined. The incidence of the types among the prison population is not markedly different from that observed by other investigators in other populations. Types cannot be precisely differentiated by mere inspection. A number of men classified as asthenic have relatively larger chest, hip and abdominal measurements than do many classed as athletic. The subjectively classified athletics run considerably into the range of the pyknics on the same criteria. The distributions both for estimate of type and for the physical measurements "indicate that we are dealing with a normal distribution constituting a continuous progression from the characteristics that define the extreme asthenic to those that determine the 'best' pyknic habitus." The same statement can be made for performance data. Grouping of asthenics and athletics into a single group of leptosomes seems not justified on the basis of any of the physical and testing data. With respect to the tests, there is no doubt that differences in performance of the groups can be demonstrated. The following tests yielded significant differences between the groups: Army Alpha, information, reaction time at irregular intervals, writing fast, cancellation, speed of color fusion, Young's light series, Franz's dot-tapping, writing backwards, substitution. The differences between the various means for the groups are expressed in terms of reliability of the difference. Other differences determined show that the asthenics are relatively more schizothymic and the pyknics more cyclothymic in tendency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)