DEFENSIVENESS AND PSI: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS (CAROLINE WATT)

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DEFENSIVENESS AND PSI:
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS 1
Caroline Watt
Psychology Department
University of Edinburgh
ABSTRACT
The link between defensiveness and psi scoring has long interested
parapsychologists. Probably the most systematic research into this relationship has
examined individuals' scores on the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT) in relation to
their scores on an ESP task. These DMT-ESP studies have found that individuals
rated as high defensive on the DMT tend to score below chance on an ESP
measure, while those who are low defensive on the DMT tend to have above
chance ESP scores. This promising line of research has not been replicated or
followed-up by other parapsychologists, perhaps because of practical,
methodological and theoretical difficulties associated with the DMT. This paper
outlines these difficulties and suggests future lines of research into the relationship
between defensiveness and psi scoring.
1 I would like to thank Deborah Delanoy, Julie Milton and Robert Morris for their
helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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 1. INTRODUCTION
Humans seem to vary in how they operate
under thesame conditions, land stress is one
circumstances, yet others perform badly
factor which may contribute to human error (Dixon, 1987). Unpleasant or threatening
information is one possible source of stress and a wide body of research has focused on
how individuals respond to such information; this is generally known as defensiveness
research. Some of this research has been conducted in the area of subliminal perception,
where individuals are presented, under difficult perceptual circumstances, with emotional
and neutral information. "Perceptually defensive" individuals take longer to report
awareness of emotional than neutral stimuli, while others who are "perceptually vigilant"
report awareness of the emotional stimuli more quickly than for neutral stimuli. Another
area of research into defensiveness originates from the Freudian theory of defense
mechanisms (the ego's various tactics to combat anxiety provoked by both internal and
external events). The Defense Mechanism Test (DMT) is perhaps the most extensively
researched instrument which purports to identify the operation of defense mechanisms in
both clinical and applied settings (Kline, 1981). It is of interest to parapsychologists
because of several studies which have compared individuals' DMT scores with their
scores on an ESP task. These studies, to be described in more detail below, have
repeatedly found a relationship between defensiveness and psi scoring, whereby low
defensive individuals tend to score above chance at an ESP task, and high defensive
individuals tend to score below chance at an ESP task. These findings suggest that the
DMT, or some other measure of defensiveness, may provide parapsychologists with a
valuable tool for examining the interaction between various situational, target-related,
cognitive and personality factors, and how this affects the direction and degree of
individuals' ESP scoring. Evidently a greater understanding of these factors might allow
their manipulation so as to enable parapsychologists to stabilize or improve psi scoring.
This paper outlines studies which have indicated a defensiveness-psi relationship,
focusing especially on the DMT-ESP studies. It points out the problems associated with
the use of the DMT and suggests future lines of research which might overcome these
problems and increase our understanding of the defensiveness-psi relationship.
2. DEFENSIVENESS AND PSI
Parapsychologists have used a variety of different measures relating defensiveness to
ESP scoring, as well as using a variety of definitions of defensiveness. For instance,
Braud (1976, 1977), Williams & Duke (1980), and Bellis & Morris (1980) used an
"openness questionnaire" which defined non-defensiveness as an ability to deal with
unpleasant or threatening material, and a self-disclosing attitude. All of these studies
have generally found the same trend towards more psi-hitting from more "open" subjects.
A subsequent study using a shorter version of this questionnaire found no significant
difference between psi-hitters and psi-missers on questionnaire scores, however the entire
sample consisted of low-defensive subjects (Sondow, Braud & Barker, 1982). Reports of
bizarre and chaotic dreams, considered to reflect tolerance for "uncensored primary
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process material and low defensiveness", were found to correlate significantly with psi
success (Sondow, 1987, p.43). Similarly, Roney-Dougal (1982) found that success at
both subliminal and extrasensory perception tasks was related to openness to experience
of altered states of consciousness. An unusual performance measure of defensiveness
was suggested by Stanford & Schroeter (1978): the degree to which subjes chose recline a chair for a word association ESP task. It was felt that low def nsive individuals
might choose the fully reclined position, while high defensive individuals might feel
more vulnerable, threatened and less able to relax in such a position and should therefore
choose a more upright seating posture. This study found that subjects who fully reclined
the chair had significantly greater than chance ESP scores, while remaining subjects
scored non-significantly below MCE, although the difference between the two groups
was not significant. Despite the variety of methods, measures and definitions of defensiveness seen in the
above studies, their results generally agree that less defensive subjects tend to psi-hit and
defensive subjects tend to psi-miss. The reliability of this observation isfurther
d
strengthened by a group of studies which have relatively systematically examined the
defensiveness-psi relationship: the DMT-ESP studies.
2.1. The Defense Mechanism Test (DMT)
The DMT was developed in Sweden by Ulf Kragh (1955). Subjects are repeatedly
shown a picture meant to provoke defensiveness in a series of gradually lengthening
exposures. The picture usually portrays a central "hero" figure (of the same sex as the
subject) with an older, ugly "threat" figure emerging from the shadows behind the hero.
This picture series is preceded and followed by an exposure of a neutral "distractor"
picture (responses to which are not evaluated), and then a second picture is shown in
another series of successively lengthening exposures. Using psychoanalytic assumptions,
Kragh argued that through projection the subject would identify with the hero figure;
then defense mechanisms would be provoked by the apparent threat to the hero from secondary figure. Initial exposures are very brief and the subject is ex the
gain only
fragmentary information about the picture content; however for each exppuosre to he or she
is required to draw or describe what he or she thought was in the picture, until finally correct description is given. The various transformations and distortions which occur in
the subject's responses can be interpreted by a trained judge as signs of the operation of
Freudian defense mechanisms. The technique of presenting the stimulus picture serially
and in increasingly lengthy steps is based on the principle known as percept-genetics
(Kragh & Smith, 1970; Smith & Westerlundh, 1980). This theory suggests that
perception is a constructive or an adaptive process, and that it is possible to examine this
process by disrupting or "fractioning" perception through presenting the stimulus very
briefly and serially. It is thought that some of the perceptual distortions which occur
during the fractioning process may indicate the operation of defense mechanisms. At
very brief ("stimulus distal") exposures, the stimulus is highly ambiguous and the
subject's perception of it is thought to be dominated by internal, personality factors. At
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longer ("stimulus proximal") exposures the stimulus becomes increasingly clear and early
perceptions are modified until an accurate description of the stimulus is given. The DMT
therefore has three basic theoretical assumptions: that through projection the subject
identifies with the hero figure; that the presence of the secondary figure activates
Freudian or neo-Freudian defenses; and that by fractioning perception these defenses can
be studied and scored.
In applied settings the DMT can reliably predict how people will react in stressful or
dangerous situations (for a review of these studies, see Cooper, 1988a). For instance,
Kragh (1970) describes two studies which successfully used the DMT to predict which
aviation cadets would be unsuccessful in their training, and to predict the training success
of Danish attack divers. For the former study, the inter-rater reliabilities (from .59 to .90)
were judged to be low to satisfactory compared with ordinary aptitude tests, and as good
as or better than those found with other projective tests. The most experienced DMT
rater achieved the highest validity. For the latter study, inter-rater reliabilities were
higher (from .69 to .92) and again there was a significant correlation between DMT
scoring and the criteria set for success or failure in training. The DMT has also been
successfully used to predict accident prone parachutists and deep sea divers (Vaernes,
1982; Vaernes & Darragh, 1982). Nowadays, the DMT is used as part of the standard
screening procedure for Scandinavian military personnel.
The above research indicates the ability of the DMT to predict susceptibility to stress. It
is less clear, however, whether the DMT is actually measuring the operation of Freudian
defense mechanisms (Cooper 1982, Cooper & Kline 1986, Kline 1987, Cooper 1988a.,
1988b.); I will enlarge on this point in section 2.3. below. For the moment, therefore,
one can only say that the DMT appears to be measuring responses to emotional or
threatening stimuli, and it has been successfully used in applied settings.
Traditionally, there are 13 studies (listed in the Appendix) which have been regarded as
the principal DMT-ESP studies. These 13 have systematically compared people's DMT
scores with their performance on forced-choice ESP tasks. There are also a number of
other studies which have compared scores on the DMT (or approximations to it) with
ESP scores. These studies, it appears, have not been included in a recent meta-analysis
of DMT-ESP research (Haraldsson, Houtkooper & Hoeltje, 1987) because they are not
directly comparable with the principal studies. Some are merely pilot studies; some use
free-response rather than forced-choice methodologies; and some use "unofficial" or
exploratory versions of the DMT. For the sake of completeness, however, I will briefly
outline the findings of these additional studies before moving on to describe the 13
principal DMT-ESP studies.
Johnson & Hartwell (1979) conducted an exploratory study, testing no specific
hypotheses, relating defensiveness as measured by the DMT to success at trying to guess
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whether an agent was looking at a pleasant picture or a group of unpleasant pictures.
Post hoc analyses found that, contrary to expectation, the more defensive subjects were
non-significantly more accurate at guessing than the less defensive subjects. With
hindsight, however, the authors were critical of their experimental procedure (the
environment was noisy and the interactions with subjects were rushed) and in future they
would plan to work with extreme DMT scorers. Another pilot study (Johnson &
Nordbeck, unpublished) related subjects' DMT scores with their performance at an ESP
test of precognition with Zener card symbols as targets. Using an exploratory scoring
system for the DMT, it was found that significantly more psi-hitters showed relatively
undistorted perceptions of the DMT stimuli than did psi-missers. This study also found
another sign, non-significant but in the expected direction, that more defensive subjects
tended to psi-miss.
Selecting high and low scorers on their own "unofficial" version of the DMT to
participate in a subsequent free-response clairvoyance task incorporating a relaxation
tape with an "impression period", Miller & 'York (1976) found no significant
"DMT"-ESP correlation, though results were in the expected direction. A follow-up
study by York (1977), presented at the 1976 PA Convention, gave subjects the DMT and
subsequently subjects participated in a free-response "ganzfeld" clairvoyance procedure.
(It is questionable whether this could be considered a standard ganzfeld, since subjects
were not exposed to red light, and did not hear continuous white or pink noise. Instead,
they listened to a muscular and mental relaxation tape concluding with five minutes of
white noise as an impression period, followed by a reminder to relax, then a second five
minute white noise impression period.) This study yielded significant psi scoring overall
(Z=2.92, p.30, two-tailed).
Finally, a study with 15 high and 15 low DMT scorers from Icelandic VII (Haraldsson &
Gissurarson, 1985), claiming to be the first ever to compare DMT scores with
free-response ESP performance, used a ganzfeld procedure with pictorial targets for the
ESP task. This study found a small non-significant DMT-ESP correlation opposite to the
expected direction.
The results from this diverse group of studies are quite inconclusive. Let us now look in
more detail at those studies which have more systematically examined the relationship
between DMT scores and scores on forced-choice ESP tasks. The first study arose from
an idea of Martin Johnson (who had studied with Kragh and was very familiar with the
DMT) that people who tend to be defensive in normal perception might respond similarly
towards extrasensory perceptions (Carpenter 1965). These studies all have broadly
similar characteristics. Subjects are volunteer undergraduate students (the Icelandic
series used male subjects only and tried to avoid using psychology students). There are
two testing sessions. In one, subjects are administered the DMT in groups (from 2 to 6
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individuals), and in the other they take one or two psi tests which tend to be of
restricted-choice clairvoyance or precognitive design. For instance, the clairvoyance test
may consist of a computer game where the subject has to guess which of four windows
on a computer screen has been randomly selected by the computer as the target. Subjects
may work in pairs and a sense of light-hearted competition may be encouraged. For the
precognition test subjects may be asked to guess which of four letters will later be
selected by a computer as target. In most of the studies the DMT results were scored
independently and only after all the ESP results had been collected were the ESP scores
correlated with the DMT scores. The results are summarised in Table 1.
Table 1: A summary of the main characteristics of the principal DMT-ESP studies -
correlations between DMT and ESP scores (adapted from Haraldsson et al. 1987).
Study
N
Spearman's rho
p*
footnotes
us I
10
.79
.01
1
US II
16
.67
.005
1
US III
11
.59
.05
DUTCH I
18
.42
.05
DUTCH II
49
.26
.05
DUTCH III
16
-.19
NS
ICELANDIC I
37
.47
.002
3
ICELANDIC II
37
.17
NS
ICELANDIC III
41
.02
NS
ICELANDIC IV
54
.26
.03
4
ICELANDIC V
46
.11
NS
ICELANDIC VI
44
.06
NS
ICELANDIC VII
48
.11
NS
* One-tailed
1. Pilot study, not double-blind.
2. Pilot study, individual DMT testing.
3. Icelandic Studies Ito VI gave subjects one clairvoyance and one precognition test;
Icelandic VII gave two clairvoyance tests. The correlations shown are between DMT
scores and 145t ESP scores.
4. Only partially double-blind, but this was shown not to have influenced ratings. Prior
selection of subjects based on extreme dream recall questionnaire scores or extreme
scores on precognition test.
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It seems that Johnson's intuition was correct: in all but one of the 13 studies, the
DMT-ESP correlation has been in a positive direction, and in seven of these studies the
correlation is independently significant. High defensive subjects tend to score below
chance at forced choice psi tests, and low defensive subjects tend to score above chance.
A meta-analysis of these studies (conducted by Haraldsson, Houtkooper & Hoeltje,
1987) found this correlation to be highly significant (p=0.0000019, one-tailed). When
the three studies which did not have a double-blind design were excluded from the
analysis, there remained a significant correlation (p=0.00028, one-tailed) (Haraldsson,
Houtkooper & Hoeltje, 1987).
Table 1 illustrates, however, that the strength of the DMT-ESP correlation has gradually
weakened. One possible explanation for this decline may be that US I and US II were
not double-blind, perhaps leading to an artefactual inflation of the correlation for these
studies. However, even excluding the studies which were not double-blind, there
remains a pattern of positive but declining DMT-ESP correlations. It has been suggested
that the pattern of correlation represents some kind of initial effect or experimenter effect,
as each of the experimental series was begun with fresh energy and enthusiasm by either
Martin Johnson or Erlendur Haraldsson (Haraldsson & Johnson, 1979). On the other
hand, it is possible that the declining correlations in each of these series reflect
unreported changes in attitude, methodology, or analysis of results. Indeed, the authors
themselves stress the need for independent replication of the DMT-ESP studies (Johnson
& Haraldsson, 1984; Haraldsson, Houtkooper & Hoeltje, 1987), as most of these studies
have been conducted at least in part by only two researchers: Johnson and Haraldsson.
Given that replicable patterns can be hard to come by in parapsychology, why is it that
other parapsychologists have been slow to follow-up on these promising indications of a
fairly consistent relationship between defensiveness and ESP scoring? The answer may
lie with some difficulties associated with the DMT.
2.3. Drawbacks of the DMT
One obvious problem affecting all of parapsychology is the lack of manpower and
funding to follow up interesting lines of research. However, there are some practical,
methodological and theoretical drawbacks specifically associated with the DMT which
may have discouraged other researchers from working with it.
1. To properly administer and score the DMT requires 3 months intensive training
(Johnson & Haraldsson, 1984); this is expensive both in terms of time and money. The
interpretation of DMT protocols is a particularly skilled task; it may take more than three
months of experience before inter- and intra- rater reliability is satisfactory (Haraldsson
& Johnson, 1979). Martin Johnson and Ulf Kragh have done most of the scoring in the
13 DMT-ESP studies, and have shown a very respectable inter-rater reliability (e.g. .93
and .90 for two samples of 12 subjects each; Johnson & Haraldsson, 1984). However, as
Kragh developed the DMT and Johnson studied with Kragh there could hardly be two
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people better qualified to evaluate DMT protocols; this task may be somewhat more
daunting to less experienced researchers.
2. The DMT was developed in Scandinavia and is unfamiliar to psychologists in
Western Europe and the USA; speaking from my own experience as a member of the
Psychology Department at Edinburgh University, I have yet to discover a
non-parapsychologist colleague here who is familiar with the DMT. This situation may
not be helped by the fact that, so far as I know, there is only one published translation of
the complex scoring scheme into English (Westerlundh, 1976; there is also an English
translation in an unpublished PhD thesis by Cooper, 1982). Therefore, until knowledge
of the DMT spreads outside of Scandinavia, few will use it, and so few will be able to
score it reliably.
3. Another drawback with the DMT is that it is time consuming to administer and
score. Group administration of the DMT, quicker than individual testing, is the norm for
the DMT-ESP studies. However, this is less desirable than individual testing, as the
former makes it difficult to ensure that each subject experiences identical levels of
stimulus and background illumination, identical angles and distances from the screen,
and so on. Regardless of whether subjects are tested individually or in groups, each
subject's series of responses must be scored individually - a lengthy process. When
resources of time and money are scarce, parapsychologists might be more inclined to use
a more convenient measure of defensiveness.
4. Finally, the DMT is based on individuals' responses to a series of exposures to only
two pictures which are intended to be threatening. This raises the question of whether we
can know what the DMT is actually measuring. Detailed studies of the DMT,
manipulating the content of the stimulus pictures, have shown that the presence of the
threatening secondary figure is necessary for producing the distorted responses which are
thought to correspond to defense mechanisms (e.g. Cooper & Kline, 1986). However, it
has yet to be demonstrated that Freudian mechanisms are indeed involved. Kline (1987)
argues that, although the various signs of defensiveness were derived from
psychoanalytic studies of individuals in a clinical setting, these have face validity only.
For example, the defense mechanism of Isolation is coded when "the hero and secondary
figure are separated or isolated; one may not be seen"; for Denial, "the threat is
emphatically denied" (Kline, 1987, p.55). Just because a part of a DMT protocol
resembles a defense mechanism, does not confirm that the individual's responses actually
reflect the operation of Freudian processes. While Cooper & Kline (1986) found some
indications that responses to the DMT were as hypothesized from Freudian theory, they
also found little correspondence between the repression scale of the DMT and a measure
of perceptual defense, thus casting doubt on this aspect of the DMT. Elsewhere, Cooper
has suggested that even more pronounced distortions might be elicited by abandoning the
"hero/secondary" notion in favour of a purely aversive stimulus. Anecdotally, he noticed
that "more dramatic distortions were observed to picture 8BM of the TAT, which depicts
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a rather primitive surgical operation, than to the more traditional "ugly face" threat"
(Cooper, 1982, p.286).
3. FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR DEFENSIVENESS-PSI RESEARCH
The above-mentioned problems should not overshadow the fact that the DMT can
successfully predict responses to environmental stress in a practical setting. Further, it
already has an honourable place in parapsychological research. This position will be
strengthened by those future studies which are planning to use the DMT. Icelandic study
X will soon be conducted, hopefully to be followed by the publication of the results of
Icelandic studies VIII, IX, and X (Haraldsson, personal communication). Adrian Parker
is studying the relationship between absorption, and defensiveness as measured by the
DMT, and reported anomalous experiences, from clinical, cognitive and
parapsychological perspectives (Parker, 1989). Another question worth following up is
whether the DMT-ESP correlation is specific to restricted-choice ESP tasks. The studies
described in section 2.2. which have used the DMT (or approximations to it) and
free-response ESP tasks (Miller & York, 1976; York, 1977, results in York & Morris,
unpublished; haraldsson & Gissurarson, 1985) have quite inconclusive results. These
authors have speculated that the ganzfeld procedure may be insufficiently stressful for the
subject to activate defense mechanisms; in fact Haraldsson & Gissurarson point out that
in psychoanalytic theory, free association (similar in some respects to the ganzfeld
situation) has been considered to mitigate against the operation of defense mechanisms.
Recall that many of the DMT-ESP studies attempted to create a competitive situation for
the ESP tests which may raise subjects' stress levels. York & Morris (unpublished)
suggest that future studies might look at the DMT-ESP correlation in different psi-testing
modes, for example competition versus no competition, and use of psi-conducive
procedures versus not. Research along these lines may give further insight into the
relationship between defensiveness and psi scoring.
Any DMT research which builds upon what has gone before in this field can only be
welcomed. However, the promising DMT-ESP findings can also be followed up by
research which is conceptually similar, though not using the DMT itself. For instance,
future research might consider alternative measures of defensiveness which could go
some way to overcoming some of the problems particularly associated with the DMT.
One strategy might be to use a subliminal perception task aimed at identifying
perceptually defensive or vigilant individuals. Such a task could be administered quickly
and automatically, requiring no training, and it could be objectively scored. This might
encourage attempts to replicate any interesting findings. It might use a variety of stimuli,
neutral, emotional and control (i.e. transmitting the same amount of light as the
experimental stimuli, but conveying no meaning to the subject), thus permitting a greater
understanding of what kinds of stimuli elicit which reactions. Given the already
established links between defensiveness and psi scoring, the use of a wider range of
stimuli would therefore enable more detailed study of the factors which appear to
influence direction of psi scoring (for example, clear identification of defensive or
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vigilant individuals might suggest what kinds of ESP target material would be most
suitable for them).
I am currently conducting some preliminary research along these lines, exploring
whether it is possible to identify perceptually defensive or vigilant individuals by
presenting them with weakly illuminated stimulus slides and asking them to indicate
when they first become aware of the presence of the slides. At this "subjective awareness
threshold", the experimental participant reports no awareness of the presence of any other
information apart from the overall rectangular shape of the slide. In fact, however, each
slide portrays one of four different categories of information: either simple black and
white line drawings which have previously been judged to be emotionally negative or
neutral; or matched control slides, which are designed to have the same light transmitting
properties as the pictorial slides, but which do not portray any meaningful information.
Fluctuations in the illumination level at which the experimental participants report
awareness of the slide may represent an index of their reactions to the
subliminally-presented emotional , neutral and control information, thus enabling them
to be identified as perceptually defensive or vigilant.
Some indication that this may be a promising general technique to explore perceptual
defense and vigilance was found in an undergraduate thesis by Peter Gregor, conducted
at the Psychology Department in Edinburgh University in 1972, and supervised by John
Beloff (Gregor, 1972). Gregor presented subjects with gradually brightening emotional
(e.g. cancer), neutral (e.g. circus) and control words (rev?'"d and inverted emotional or
neutral words) on slides, and used subjects' reported awareness of the presence of a slide
as an indicator of their perceptual defensiveness or vigilance (Gregor reports that his
experimental participants were never aware that the slides contained any information).
The results of this study indicated generally higher thresholds for slides containing
emotional words compared to their neutral counterparts; however, the highest threshold
overall was found for a slide which portrayed a nonsense word. Thus, the results suggest
that individuals may respond to the meaning of a subliminally-presented stimulus, but it
is not clear whether this response is due to defensive processes.
The studies currently being conducted seek to preserve the strengths of Gregor's method
(simplicity; and the use of a neutral indicator of subjective awareness threshold which
avoids criticisms of response bias) while resolving its weaknesses (manual slide insertion
and illumination means the experimenter may not be blind as to the slide contents, and
may not present each slide in an identical manner; manual recording of results may also
allow bias and error to affect results). The apparatus used by Gregor (known as
"Pandora's Box") has been cannibalized and modernized so that slide presentation,
illumination, and recording of results are all now under computer control. Pandora's Box
is a tachistoscope which has one field constantly illuminated by an electroluminescent
panel (thus removing the need for total dark adaptation in subjects). The second field has
been replaced by a slide projector placed so that, when a slide drops into the projector, at
full illumination the subject sees the slide contents in the centre of the constantly
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illuminated background field. The projector bulb has been replaced by a small
electroluminescent panel which may be varied in intensity through a computer program.
For the main pilot study just completed, 21 subjects each did two sessions on Pandora's
Box. In each session, subjects did 5 practice trials (a trial is where one slide is gradually
illuminated until the subject indicates that he or she has become aware of its presence),
and then 2 runs of 16 trials, separated by a short break half-way through. For stimuli
there were 8 slides portraying pictures which had previously been judged (by 20
individuals, 9 of whom took part in the present study) to be emotionally negative, 8
slides portraying emotionally neutral pictures, and 16 control slides, matched to each of
the emotional or neutral slides. Half of the slides were shown at the first session, half at
the second session, counterbalanced across subjects. Each subject saw the slides in a
different random order.
The slide illumination level at which each subject reported awareness of each slide was
calculated. The preliminary results from this pilot study suggest that some individuals do
indeed respond either defensively or vigilantly to negative emotional slides, compared to
the other slide categories, while other individuals showed no consistent effects
whatsoever. Further, it was found that of those individuals who had previously rated the
pictures for emotionality, those who appeared to be defensive or vigilant on Pandora's
Box had rated the "emotional" slides more negatively emotional than those who showed
no consistent scoring on Pandora's Box. This post hoc finding therefore provides
additional support for the hypothesis that changes in subjective awareness threshold for
emotional as compared to other slides were due to the emotional nature of these slides for
the individual participants rather than to some as yet undiscovered artefact.
These effects were not strong, however, and future studies will attempt to strengthen the
effects by cutting out some sources of noise in the data. Should these attempts be
successful, it will then be possible to conduct a conceptual replication of the DMT-ESP
studies, by comparing individuals' defensiveness or vigilance scores with their scores on
a psi task. Whereas the DMT-ESP studies have tested individuals in quite different
situations, using threatening pictures for the DMT yet emotionally neutral targets such as
letters or boxes for the ESP tests, future studies should increase the similarities between
the conditions for testing for perceptual defensiveness or vigilance, and the conditions for
testing ESP performance. Possibly, the correlation which has already been observed
between defensiveness and psi may be enhanced by making the two situations more
comparable. Therefore I would aim to use for the ESP task target material similar if not
identical to that used for the subliminal perception task. This is not a new idea; in fact it
was suggested in the first ever DMT-ESP report: "If the ESP targets were constructed
out of threatening figures rather than geometric designs, would the effect be stronger?"
(Carpenter, 1965, p.73).
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The link between defensiveness and psi scoring has interested parapsychologists for
many years. The most consistent research into this relationship has been the DMT-ESP
studies; these have found that individuals rated as high defensive on the DMT tend to
score below chance on a psi measure, while those who are low defensive on the DMT
tend to score above chance on a psi measure. This research has lots of exciting
implications but it has not been replicated or followed up by other parapsychologists, I
believe, because of practical, methodological and. theoretical difficulties associated with
the DMT. While one should applaud studies incorporating the DMT itself, future
research might be able to overcome these difficulties by exploring alternative methods
for identifying individuals as perceptually defensive or vigilant. If successful, this may
encourage parapsychologists to conceptually replicate and extend the DMT-ESP studies.
Further insights into the defensiveness-psi relationship may also be gained by exploring
different psi-testing situations in relation to DMT scores.
There are several reasons why research to follow up on the DMT-ESP studies would be
of interest to parapsychologists. First of all, there is the question of psi-missing and
psi-hitting. If we can find a convenient test which predicts reliably whether or not a
person is likely to score above or below chance at a psi task, then we may begin to
explore reasons why people psi-miss. I should stress at this point that while people are
usually either perceptually defensive or vigilant, this may not imply that they are
therefore bound to either psi-miss or psi-hit whenever they take part in an ESP test.
More research is needed on this question, but it is quite likely that methodological,
procedural and personality factors may interact to produce psi scoring in a particular
direction. This suggestion is supported by research by Stanford and colleagues into the
interaction between noise level in the ganzfeld, extraversion-introversion, and the
enjoyment level of the subject in a ganzfeld expet'iment. Working on the hypothesis that
noise provides stimulation which heightens arousal and thereby influences performance
to approach or exceed optimal arousal levels, it was found that extraverts (who are
thought to be typically less aroused than introverts in a given situation) enjoyed the
ganzfeld situation under noise more than introverts did (Stanford, Frank, Kass & Skoll,
1989). Whether ganzfeld enjoyment was related to ESP scoring is to be reported in a
subsequent paper, but the present study indicates how one procedural factor, noise in the
ganzfeld, may interact with a personality variable. Another aspect of ESP experiments
which may be altered to suit subject types or preferences is the target. As myself and
Deborah Delanoy pointed out recently (Delanoy, 1989; Watt, 1989), there has been little
systematic research to identify the characteristics of good ESP targets. I will be looking
at individuals' responses to emotional and neutral targets in both subliminal and
extrasensory conditions. This may give some valuable clues as to which combination of
target and subject characteristics seems to encourage positive psi-scoring.
In sum, further research into factors influencing the defensiveness-psi relationship may
enable parapsychologists to improve psi scoring by helping them to select experimental
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methodologies most suited to each individual participant, and by enabling the training of
participants to capitalize on the factors which seem to encourage psi-hitting and to reduce
the influence of factors apparently linked to psi-missing.
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APPENDIX - Identification of the principal DMT-ESP studies.
DUTCHI
DUTCH II
DUTCH III
ICELANDIC I
ICELANDIC II
ICELANDIC III
ICELANDIC IV
ICELANDIC V
ICELANDIC VI
ICELANDIC VII
Carpenter (1965)
Johnson & Kanthamani (1967)
Johnson & Kanthamani (1967)
Johnson (1975)
Johnson & Lubke (1977)
Houtkooper, unpublished, results reported in Haraldsson
Houtkooper & Hoeltje (1987)
Haraldsson (1978)
Johnson & Haraldsson (1979)
Haraldsson & Johnson (1979)
Johnson & Haraldsson (1984)
Johnson & Haraldsson (1984)
Haraldsson & Johnson (1986)
Haraldsson, Houtkooper & Hoeltje (1987)
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